Come on. That’s clearly not true. While there have been some cases where the Best Picture award went to a film like you describe, more often it went to some movie that was no more than a middling success in any financial sense. Nor can you argue that most of the winning films were financial successes against the odds as you claim that Titanic was.
***Titanic ***was a rarity. The Oscar almost NEVER goes to the most popular movie of the year. Even when a blockbuster ALSO happens to be an excellent movie, it will usually lose out (if it’s nominated at all) to a less financially successful film.
Jaws (a blockbuster that was also an excellent film) didn’t win- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest did.
***Star Wars *** (a blockbuster that was also an excellent film) didn’t win- Annie Hall did.
The Dark Knight didn’t win- Slumdog Millionaire did.
You certainly don’t have to like Titanic, but it definitely did NOT win because it raked in a lot of money.
It amazes me that they consider six BP winners worse than Forrest Gump.
And every time I hear of *How Green Was My Valley, *I think they’re referring to *The Corn is Green, *which is one of the great ones.
While I didn’t like this version of “Robin Hood” much, Robin is shooting arrows all over the place throughout the movie. He shoots the primary villain in the face probably eight minutes in. He shoots French soldiers in the first seige before that.
This just isn’t so.
'Cause I like to build spreadsheets, I built one containing all B. Picture nominees since 1927 (476 of them, not counting this year) and researched every single film’s box office takes*, ranking them both in the overall population of movies released that year and within the subset of B. Picture nominees for that year.
The results are pretty conclusive: Box office success is a large, if not the largest, predicator of which movie will win Best Picture:
… 27% of Best Picture winners (22 films out of 82 awards) were the #1 box office grossing movie of the year upon initial release (caveat: in three of these years (61, 46, 40) the B. Picture winner was overtaken by a Disney film with multiple releases in subsequent years. All my sources combined the release #s for Disney movies.)
… 77% of BP winners were among their years top-10 grossing films. The first Best Picture winner not to be a top-10 film was 1948’s Hamlet, which ranked 17th in box office. The first BP winner not to be a top-20 film was 1987’s The Last Emperor (#25 for the year).
… The average yearly box office rank of BP winners is 8.5. For losers it’s 19.27.
… Within the categories themselves, if you rank the nominees by box office grosses, there is a 41% chance that the highest grossing movie will win the award. For the top-two highest grossing movies, there is a 71% chance of one of those winning. Only three movies ranked last among grosses won the award - oddly enough, all in the late 1940’s.
You have a yearly award that is open to approximately 120-400 movies per year (depending upon # of films released) and the statistics show that 27% of those already awarded just happen to have gone to the most popular movie of their year, and 77% of the statues have gone to films that were one of the 10 most popular of their year.
This is not a coincidence.
I stand by my statement - Best Picture is an industry award given to executives who were successful in guiding film projects through to completion and, ultimately, audience acceptance and financial reward. It is not an award based on the artistic merits of the film - that’s what all the other awards are for.
*Mostly Wiki and BoxOfficeMojo.
Please see my above post.
Since Hollywood accounting is so vague and profit figures hard to come by (just ask Art Buchwald), voters tend to follow the overall box office grosses when contemplating who to vote for B. Picture.
Ah, Titanic. I remember watching it and thinking how horribly the movie was put together. The “special effects” were, I thought, appallingly bad (even at the time). Same story with the much ballyhooed special effects in Gladiator, which to me looked rather sucky - look at the arena scenes and try not to hurt yourself on all the blurry CGI pixels.
I think this might be due to prejudice against science fiction. In spite of being one of the most technically perfect films ever made, 2001: A Space Odyssey only won an Oscar for best special effects (pretty much the bare minimum the voters could get away with) and was beaten out for Best Director, Best Art Direction, and Best Screenplay. Boggling. It wasn’t even nominated for best movie (which at least Planet of the Apes was - though it won nothing).
Did not see Slumdog so I cannot compare, but **The Dark Knight **did not deserve to win IMO. With the exception of the Joker (who was stunning), this was an inferior movie and not anywhere near as good as Batman Begins. It’s not only full of contrived devices and cheaply theatrical set-ups, but it also seemed rather poorly edited.
JohnT writes:
> … The average yearly box office rank of BP winners is 8.5. For losers it’s 19.27.
This proves nearly the opposite of what you’re claiming. If the box office rank is down around 8 or 9, then it’s a “middling success in any financial sense,” as I said. I said that sometimes it’s the film with the biggest box office. 27% is sometimes. Finishing barely within the top 10 is not a big success.
When you rank things purely within the nominees, you do get more often that the biggest box office is the winner. Well, of course. The only films nominated are those with some critical recognition. If you balance out critical recognition and box office appeal, you do get something closer to what the Academy is looking for. Winning an Oscar takes:
!. Critical recognition
2. Popular success
3. Familiarity to the Academy voters
4. Middle-brow status (i.e., no obscure movies with purely high-brow status among critics)
5. Desire of the Academy voters to give someone with a long track record an Oscar, even if this isn’t their best film
6, etc. A number of even more vague criteria
All of these factors are relevant. The Academy voters use all of them in their voting. You can’t pick out one of them and claim that that’s the only factor that they use.
Your criteria WERE extremely accurate for many years, but things have changed over the past decade.
For a long time, the perfect formula for winning an Oscar was to combine the lush, sweeping visuals of David Lean with the earnest, preachy moralizing of Stanley Kramer. Historical epics featuring period costumes, gorgeous cinematography and a politiclaly correct message used to be Oscar bait.
But now? Increasingly, the Best Picture nominees are films nobody saw. ***The Hurt ***Locker may have been a brillant film, but it wasn’t a hit. Neither was Slumdog Millionaire. Neither was Crash.
The mere fact that we now have 10 Best Picture nominees illustrates how things have changed. The Academy requires ten nominees, just to increase the odds that ONE popular movie will get a nomination! I’m willing to bet that, in a year or two, we’ll get TEN nominees that nobody except critics and cinephiles saw (will the Academy then require 20 nominees?).
increasingly, it’s hard to tell the Oscars from the Spirit awards.
And who did that?
Quote=Me: “Box office success is a large, if not the largest, predicator of which movie will win Best Picture.”
I don’t see the word “only” in there.
And I don’t understand how you can claim that 77% of B. Picture winners going to the top 5% of earning films for each year (assume 200 US film productions - 10/200 = 5%) doesn’t show that box office grosses are a strong predictor, possibly the strongest predictor, of who will win Best Picture. Especially coupled with the fact that over 1 out of 4 statuettes go to the #1 grossing movie of the year.
This isn’t just a slight statistical variation that may indicate bias towards money-making pictures, this is bias, pure and simple, and an extemely strong correlation at that.
Slumdog Millionaire was the 16th biggest film out of 188 US films released that year (making it among the top 8% of money-makers), and you don’t think it was a hit? Crash was made for $6.5 million, grossed $54 million, and you don’t think it was a money maker? The Hurt Locker made triple its $15 million investment - as an investor, I would be happy with a 200% return.
I am willing to take you on your bet - that within 5 years, the Academy Awards will release a B. Picture slate of films “nobody except critics and cinephiles saw”, and I will be happy to wager any amount of money you wish. For purposes of this bet, I will like “films nobody except critics and cinephiles saw” numerically defined as movies that… what, didn’t earn $100 million? Didn’t rank in the top-25 of box office grosses? Take your pick.
Really, let’s do this: I could use the cash. 
Correlation is not causation. And in MANY cases, the movies became highly profitable AFTER winning the Oscar. Which means that the Academy did NOT honor a given movie because it made a lot of money at the box office, but that the movie did very well at the box office AFTER it won an Oscar. The same will surely happen this year. If, as I expect, ***The King’s Speech ***wins the Oscar, it will draw millions of viewers who had no interest in seeing it earlier.
To use a few examples, Braveheart (a movie I like a lot) and ***Out of Africa ***(a movie I detested) were NOT huge hits at the box office when first released. But AFTER they won Oscars, people who’d avoided those movies went to theaters to see them.
***The Sting ***was not nearly as big a hit as The Exorcist.
Cuckoo’s Nest didn’t make a fraction of the money raked in by Jaws.
***Annie Hall ***didn’t make anywhere near as much money as Star Wars.
Raiders of the Lost Ark raked in far more money than On Golden Pond.
E.T. made waaaaay more money than Gandhi.
Saving Private Ryan was a much bigger hit than Shakespeare in Love.
Avatar made tons more money than The Hurt Locker.
I will never tell you that money doesn’t matter. Of COURSE it matters. But many other things matter more to voters than money.
Above all, voters want to support a certain TYPE of movie. Even a brilliant comedy or a top-notch action movie or a fantastic horror film or a magnificent sci-fi movie is highly unlikely to win an Oscar, no matter how much money it makes. Those genres just don’t command respect. Even middlebrow voters want to congratulate themselves for picking a movie that FEELS like “art.”
Just FYI…
This year, 5 B. Picture nominees have grossed over $100 million to date (Black Swan, Kings Speech, True Grit, Inception, and Toy Story 3 (#1)), translating to 1/2 of this years slate (including the odds-on winner) being “hits”. (The Social Network “only” grossed $96 million in the US, barely missing the $100 million mark).
2 of the nominees are top-10 movies, 3 are top-20 (with the Kings Speech likely to join them as time goes by - it’s still pulling in $10 million/week and is only $13 million away from being a top-20 film). And a quick review of Boxofficemojo shows that all the nominees (with the exception of 127 hours) have earned multiples of their production costs back in domestic box office grosses. Even Winter’s Bone has earned triple the producers investment.
Braveheart earned 89% of its grosses prior to its B. Picture nomination, and 97% of its grosses before its Best Picture win. It was already a hit. http://boxofficemojo.com/oscar/chart/?yr=1995&p=.htm
Out of Africa, a December 1985 release earned 84% of its US box office grosses prior to its B. Picture win and 64% of its grosses prior to nomination. It was already a hit. http://boxofficemojo.com/oscar/chart/?yr=1985&p=.htm
Even The Hurt Locker was largely played out prior to nominations being announced, with 74% of its BO grosses coming prior to nominations, 13% coming between nominations and awards, and 13% coming after winning the Oscar.
The films were successful prior to being nominated - the nominations did not make them successful.
I am confused by your figures.
If the average BOR of BPWs is 8.5 over 82 awards then their total BOR is 697.
If 22 had a BOR of 1 then the other 60 had a BOR of 675 and an average BOR of more than 11.
If 77% ( 63) were in the top 10 of which 22 were number 1, then their BOR was about 268, meaning the other 19 averaged 22.6 at the box office.
Not that convincing an argument since most movies that are total crap at the box office are total crap.
You’re right. If you have a list of numbers that average X, then remove the 25% lowest values (all of which are the number “1”), the remaining numbers will average higher. Going even further along these lines, if you keep removing higher-grossing best pictures, why, you could eventually make the argument that the “average” box office rank is 116 (The Hurt Locker, the lowest ranked B. Picture winner of all time).
I am so wrong. I admit it. 
Also, Braveheart was released during the summer of 1995 so by the time it was nominated in early 1996, it was already out on video. Best picture or not, once a movie is out on video, it’s ability to earn more money in the theaters is almost entirely exhausted.
Ebert had a great little essay once explaining the Oscars - take out the word “Best” and insert, instead, “Most”. It’s the most picture, the most acting, the most costumes (movies set in the present day almost never get costume awards, no matter how good the costuming is), etc.
It’s only Winter’s Bone of this year’s nominations that’s not a big hit. It’s also probably the best film of the year, giving the lie to the idea that films that aren’t big hits are crap.