As can be seen by this first graph, my guess was seems correct for Best Picture and Best Director, but not for Best Actor and Actress. It appears, looking back through nominees, that best acting categories tended to look through lesser known, even more foreign movies for acting performances. Picture and Director however, used to have many more higher grossing movies. Some years are obviously skewed, such as 1997 with Titanic's $600mm but in general, the number of $100mm movies nominated have declined and the average gross has declined.
For best picture, the average over the last ten years is about $113mm per movie nominated. However, in the last 3 years, no movie has even crossed the $90mm mark. Even removing the Titanic year, the average falls to about $103mm, which still shows how low the last three years have been.
Best Director shows a similar story. Although slightly lower, the average of just above $99mm is between $30mm and $50mm higher than the average gross for the categories in any of the last three years.
So the implication could be 2 things. One, the Academy is actively seeking out less commercially successful movies and trying to dig for the limited release, artsy movies for best picture. Two, and I think much more likely is that the breed of Oscar movie is pushing people to make Oscar movies that they know won't be that profitable. The average is pulled down by many more $50mm movies rather than a few really low movies. In recent years, Iwo Jima, Babel, The Queen, Crash, Capote, etc... were all designed to be Oscar movies. Producers, directors and studios seem to be going more out of their way to make winners, when they used to just overlap with otherwise popular movies.
1 comment:
I'd like to first point out that there's only a really evident trend emerging in the past three years, which isn't a large enough sample size to be statistically significant.
But even if the Academy is "out of touch," why is that bad? If that means Pirates of the Caribbean only gets one oscar, I'm totally OK with that. Most of these big budget films are so bland and unoriginal (indeed, most of them are sequels), I don't think they deserve recognition; I don't think they display any artistic merit. Isn't part of being creative, after all, about doing unique things that people have never done before?
Think about the sorts of movies that made the big bucks this past year: PotC, Cars, X-Men III... are those really the movies you're going to remember from 2006? Are those really the movies you want to remember?
If the Academy wants to maintain the shred of dignity it still (maybe) has, I'd hope it would at least give lip service to those few films that dare to be bold and innovative. Sure, X:III and PotC were (marginally) entertaining, but Children of Men and Pan's Labrynth were real works of art. I'm glad to know at least some people think filmmaking should be, at least in part, about artistry.
I'd also like to point out that a lot of what we today consider profoundly influential films flopped at the box office. Films like Vertigo, Citizen Kane, Eraserhead, Apocalypse Now, Mean Streets, Mulholland Dr., and Reservoir Dogs were all relatively unsuccessful or downright failures. But each of these films are amazing in their own right, and have been profoundly influential.
Post a Comment