Predicting the Academy Awards
By Rich Drees
Predicting what films the members of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts And Sciences will vote to bestow the Academy Awards upon is a bit like herding kittens. While it may be easy and glib to make sweeping generalizations about how “the Academy ” bestows its annual awards as if it was a single, united body, one should remember that there are actually over 6,000 voting members with over 6,000 differing opinions on which films deserve top honors for the various chosen categories.
Still, as with any set of data compiled over time, some trends do become apparent and the Academy Awards are no exception. But these trends aren’t 100 percent and strict reliance on them, for say those looking to beat their office Oscar pool, may not be the wisest course. There are always surprises each year at the awards ceremony and that, of course, is have the fun of watching the show.
Of course these trends can change over the course of the decades as the Academy’s membership has changed. For most of my analysis of the winners, I’ve tried to concentrate not so much on the Awards’ 76-year history as how the Academy has voted over the past 15 to 20 years.
One constant the can almost always be relied upon is the Academy leaning towards the conservative side. For all the lip service that may be given about how the Academy Awards are to honor excellence in film making, they are more apt to behave like they did in 2002 and give an Oscar to the likes of Ron Howard for A Beautiful Mind rather than a maverick director with a unique vision like David Lynch, who was nominated the same year as Howard for his nightmarish Mulholland Drive. The Academy’s conservatism was never more clearly evident than in 1976 when the feel good, underdog triumphant story Rocky beat far more cynical and radical films like Network, Bound For Glory, All The President’s Men and Taxi Driver for the year’s Best Picture Oscar.
(Note: Any year referenced is the year the award was presented and the not the year the film was released, hence Lord Of The Rings: Return Of The King is referenced as winning in 2004, though the film was released in 2003.)
Best Picture
There are many competing theories for the prediction of the winner of the Best Picture Academy Award. Some have merit, some don’t.
“The longest picture usually wins the Academy Award.” An interesting theory, though in actuality the odds of the Best Picture winner being the longest of all the nominated films has historically been less than 50%. The average length of a Best Picture winner in the 1990s is 152 minutes. For the first half of the current decade it’s an average of 145 minutes. Oddly enough, though the average length of the winner has shortened, the percentage of lengthiest films winning has risen slightly. Over the last ten years, 5 films that won Best Picture were the longest film out of that year's nominees- Braveheart (1995), The English Patient (1996), Titanic (1997), Gladiator (2001) and Lord Of The Ring: Return Of The King (2004).
Some may claim that the results for 2002 and 2003’s Academy Awards may be skewed by the presence of the first two installments of Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy. For such a mammoth production so skillfully executed it became fait accompli at the time that the trilogy would be recognized with Oscar gold for the final installment, The Return Of The King. However, even removing from consideration the other two installments, Fellowship Of The Ring and The Two Towers, the next two longest films in each of those years’ nominees (Gosford Park and Gangs Of New York, respectively) did not win the Oscar.
A safer bet would be “The shortest nominated film will not win the Academy Award.” The Academy tends to favor large, sprawling epics, mammoth productions that require the strong hand and vision of their directors to realize. Only two films in the history of the awards ran under 100 minutes- Annie Hall (1977) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989). Since 1990, the only picture with the shortest run time of all the nominees to win Best Picture was Chicago in 2003.
Also, don’t count on comedies bringing home the Best Picture honor. In the history of the Awards only six comedies, excluding musicals with some comedic elements, have won the Oscar- It Happened One Night (1934), You Can’t Take It With You (1938), Going My Way (1944), The Apartment (1960), Tom Jones (1963), The Sting (1973) and Annie Hall (1977).
However, if you’re looking for the most sure fire way to predict which film will win the Best Picture Oscar, look no further than the Best Director.
Best Director
It is generally assumed that the Best Picture and Best Director awards go hand in hand, the same film winning both. The most accurate indicator for Best Director is usually considered to be the Director’ s Guild of America’s award. Since 1948, the Directors Guild of America has given its own awards out honoring excellence in direction of film, television and commercials. Between 1970 and 2000, the two organizations disagreed only once a decade on the year’s best film director. In 1972, the DGA awarded Frances Ford Coppola their award for The Godfather, while Bob Fosse won the Academy Award for directing Cabaret. In 1986, Steven Spielberg won the DGA award for The Color Purple, but didn’t ’t even receive an Academy Award nomination. Ron Howard won the DGA in 1995 for Apollo 13, but lost the Oscars for both direction and picture to Mel Gibson ’s five-statue Braveheart sweep.
However, starting with the 2001 awards season, things get a little dicey. Whereas the Directors Guild honored Ang Lee for his work on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the Best Director Oscar went to Steven Soderbergh for Traffic. Rob Marshall, honored by the DGA for Chicago in 2003, would be passed over for the Oscar in favor of Roman Polanski for his film The Pianist. However, whether this is just a statistical anomaly or a major shift in how the average Academy voter casts their ballot remains to be seen.
In the past 50 years, the best picture/ best director awards have only split 8 times- in 1956 (Around The World In 80 Days/ George Stevens (Giant )), 1967 (In The Heat Of The Night/ Mike Nichols (The Graduate)), 1972 (The Godfather/ Bob Fosse (Cabaret)), 1981 (Chariots Of Fire/ Warren Beatty (Reds)), 1989 (Driving Miss Daisy/ Oliver Stone (Born On The Fourth Of July)), 1998 (Shakespeare In Love/ Steven Spielberg (Saving Private Ryan)), 2001 (Gladiator/ Steven Soderbergh (Traffic)) and 2003 (Chicago/ Roman Polanski (The Pianist)).
(To be fair, 2001’s split may be chalked up to the fact that Soderbergh had directed two films that year, Traffic and Erin Brokovich, both of which were nominated for Best Picture. It’s thought the dual nominations split Soderbergh’s potential vote tally in the Best Picture category, allowing Gladiator to win.)
Best Actor/ Actress
There are several types of roles that seem to generate more Oscar wins than others. It’s often thought that actors who adopt convincing accents or portraying a character with a disability are good bets for Oscar gold. A safer bet would be to lean towards roles that were based on real people. Out of the 12 acting awards in the last two years 6 were awarded for performances based on real people including performances by Jim Broadbent (Iris, 2002), Adrien Brody (The Pianist, 2003) and Charlize Theron (Monster, 2004).
Although the Screen Actor’s Guild have only been handing out their Actor award since 1995, they have a fairly decent track record as Academy Award predictors. In the Supporting Actor and Actress, the SAG and the Academy were of the same mind 50% of the time, Lead Actor 60% of the time and Lead Actress 70% of the time.
When analyzing the Supporting Actor category another thing to look for is a performance that could be considered a lead performance. Perhaps the best recent example of this kind of crossover occurred in 2001, when Benicio Del Toro won the Best Actor award from the SAG while he was nominated in and won the Academy’s Best Supporting Actor category.
Screenplay
The screenplay category is another award that historically was tied to the winner of Best Picture. Between 1954 and 1994, the Best Picture winner also landed the screenplay award 75% of the time. However, that percentage decreased between 1994 and 2004, with the Best Picture winner snagging the Best Screenplay award only 50% of the time. However, looking at the past 20 years, the Best Picture winner has still won the Best Screenplay award 70% of the time.
However, this method only helps to predict the winner of one of the two screenplay categories. Looking to the winners of the Writers Guild of America’s awards offers some help- Over the last 15 years, the winner of the WGA’s award of best original screenplay went on to win the same category Oscar 53% of the time, while the winner of the WGA’s award for best Adapted Screenplay would win the Adapted Screenplay Academy Award 66% of the time.
Art Direction/Cinematography/Costume Design/Editing
Since all Academy Awards are nominated by Academy members working in that particular field, it’s no coincidence that the nominees for many of the behind the scenes categories such as costume design or art direction often mirror the nominations for the awards the individual craft guilds give out. However, the Oscars are voted on by the entire voting body of the Academy, so the winners don’t always sync up with how the various guilds voted in their own awards. The Costume Designers and American Society of Cinematographers choice of award winners only matched the Academy winners 33% of the time. The Art Directors Guild awards have been much more in line with what the mainstream Academy voters felt deserved the Oscar with 62.5% of Guild winners receiving an Academy Award as well. The award from the American Cinema Editors has the best track record of matching that year’s Oscar winner at 73% of the time since 1990.