The Big Picture
A look at Best Picture winners, nominees, and the people who helped get them there.
Welcome to another edition of A Little Over The Top where we use data to discover interesting movies to watch.
To view this week’s interactive film menu, please be sure you are subscribed. Once you are signed up you’ll receive updates directly to your inbox every Friday!
With the app, you’ll be able to see the full list of titles within this week’s theme, their details, and most importantly, where you can watch them.
This week we’re taking a look at all the films that have been nominated for or won the Oscar for Best Picture. Now, we could go back and forth on the historic or current relevance of the Academy Awards. Maybe in a future post, I’ll try to break that down to brass tacks.
For now though, the Best Picture category stands as a worthwhile historical list to shine our data flashlight on. So let’s dive in.
There are currently 571 films that have been nominated for Best Picture since The Academy Awards began in 1929. In that time 93 films have won the top prize. Let’s first take a look at where those titles live across our current marketplace.
HBO MAX leads the way here in both the nominee and wins categories. As a follow-up, we’ll look more specifically at that platform to understand if that has more to do with films they choose to license, Warner Bros’, excuse me Warner Media Discovery’s prolificacy at churning out Oscar winners, or a mixture of both.
Now let’s break down what proportion of these titles are available to stream, rent, or buy.
Something that stands out here is the number of films within this list that aren’t available anywhere in the US. This means you can’t stream, rent, or buy them on any platform. Yes, I know many of these you can probably procure on DVD or Blu-Ray. But in my view, this will be a harder thing to rely on as time goes on. As more and more content is flooded into the marketplace year after year, the discovery of films that came before will become even more challenging. Losing dependable access to these movies (in a manner consistent with how most households access content) is a long-term concern for film appreciation and literacy.
In all, 44 films that have been nominated for the Best Picture Oscar are currently unavailable. One of these is Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film Rebecca which actually won the Oscar for Best Picture. In fact, Hitchcock has two titles that belong to this anomalous list. Spellbound (1945) is also not available anywhere in the US currently.
It is unclear at this time if this is a temporary phenomenon, perhaps due to complicated or transitioning rights, or if it’s a problem that might grow. This will be an area of focus for us in the future and I will report back on it.
OK. Now onto some more fun stuff.
Sifting through data on films is not just about the where, when, how much, and what. It’s also very much about the who. It’s fascinating to look at the wide view of a large collection of titles and see all of the individual names that live within it. More specifically, it’s intriguing to look at how these names relate to each other.
As I looked at the Best Picture films, I was curious to understand if there were any discernible patterns or trends within the thousands of names associated with these pictures. Clearly, something like the Academy Awards will always include the usual suspects of winners and nominees for individual awards (Directors, writers, editors, etc…).
But since it’s only a small set of credited producers, or just the studios themselves long ago, who receive the top award, it’s valuable to expand our view to the other artists and technicians who have a hand in the Oscar-winning film (no matter how big or small).
So to round out this week’s menu, we’re going to look specifically at which writers have worked on the most best picture nominees and winners. Note, this does not mean writers who have received nominations for that film or any others. It is meant to discover the people who are associated most with any number of best picture nominees.
The only requirement in this exercise is that they need to be credited as a writer (in any capacity) on at least one film nominated for best picture. From there we will look at any other nominated films they worked on as a writer.
I’m calling this the Awards Impact Score.
The goal is to generate a consistent scoring system so we can see those writers with the biggest contributions. I wanted to blend Best Picture winners and nominations into a single number that weighs a win with a higher value. This is the Weighted Awards Impact Score (wAIS). It breaks down as follows:
((Total Nominations)+(Total Wins*2))/558
Why 558? I’m glad you asked. The scoring is based on the sum of the Best Picture nominations and wins expressed as a percentage of the total nominated pictures. However, over the history of the Oscars, the total nominations within a given year have fluctuated. Sometimes it was as low as 3 and sometimes as high as 10. The 558 total represents the aggregate of an average of nomination slots over the 93 years of the Oscars to give everyone a fair shake, regardless of their place in history.
Those with a single Best Picture nomination and no wins registered a 0.18 score. This would be your Ben Afflecks, your Cameron Crowes, and so on.
Those with a high number (relatively speaking) of nominations and wins register closer to or at 1.61.
Now that I’ve shown my work, here are the top 20 wAIS writers as it stands today.
Certainly some familiar names here, and maybe some you need to brush up on a bit. Congrats to Ben Hecht, Billy Wilder, and Francis Ford Coppola on achieving champ status of the AIS.
Also, a special shout out to Alan Jay Lerner; the only one on this list with a perfect nom/win average. Maybe this will one day factor into the scoring.
But those aren’t the names that interest me most. Of this list of the top 20, there are only three people who never received their own Academy Award for writing.
Ernest Lehman, Frances Goodrich, and Albert Hackett are the unsung writing heroes of the Best Picture category.
Goodrich and Hacket were the staggeringly prolific husband and wife writing team that were responsible for The Thin Man, Father of the Bride, It's a Wonderful Life, The Diary of Anne Frank, and many more.
Ernest Lehman gave us North by Northwest, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and West Side Story just to name a few. He did receive an Honorary Academy Award in 2001 for his contributions to cinema. But he never got the glory on any of his six nominations. In fact, only 26% of all writers who register on the AIS list received an Oscar win for writing.
Writers were an obvious starting point with this experiment but I’m excited to see how it could apply to other disciplines who don’t benefit from an Oscar category of their own. Stunts anyone?
This view of things can be helpful for us to more holistically recognize the talent behind some of the most decorated films and discover (or rediscover) their individual work.
In the spirit of that, this week’s menu on the app is divided into 4 categories.
Best Picture Winners
Best Picture Nominees
The Films of Frances Goodrich & Albert Hacket
The Films of Ernest Lehman
I hope you find something great to watch. I’ll be back to you again next week with more from the rabbit hole.