Twenty years of Oscar nominees...
Every year I look forward to the Oscar nominations - I like the excitement of finding out who has been put up for the awards. I love the sensation of complete astonishment when great films are ignored and ludicrously over-acted twaddle wins. I love the Oscars because sometimes they're so very right and I love them more because sometimes they can be so very very wrong.
This year has been the first year when I have looked at the nominations for "Best Picture" and struggled to find a film that I think deserves to be there. But how to account for such a phenomenon? My first assumption was that it must have simply been a terrible year for movies in general. With such a motley selection of candidates available, what hope was there that they'd be able to find - let alone vote for - a truly great film.
But how likely is that to be true? There are any number of alternative possibilities. Firstly that they chose the wrong films, secondly that they chose the right films and that my taste is simply getting worse. And behind this are the larger questions - are the films that get nominated for Oscars today worse than the ones that were nominated ten or twenty years ago? Is there a pattern to the quality of film-making that we can track through the Oscars?
Enter a totally redundant project - the compilation of some figures about how good or bad the Oscar nominees had been over the last twenty years. I would see, or be damned, if there was any discernable pattern. And in seeing this pattern - "A Beautiful Mind"-style luminous in the world - perhaps I would see if my suspicions about this year's nominees were correct. Or perhaps, "A Beautiful Mind"-style, I would find that I had been living in a world of horrible unreality and an insane lack of judgment.
Over many minutes I decided on a campaign strategy. My comprehensive research (to take place over a boring afternoon before Countdown came on Channel Four) would involve:
- 1) Going to the IMDB.
- 2) Finding all the films nominated for "Best Film" over the last twenty years.
- 3) Adding together all the nominees 'user-ratings' for each year.
- 4) Plotting them on a graph.
Not brain-surgery, I think you'll agree. And hopelessly unscientific - we have no control group, nothing to compare them to... But interesting nonetheless... What will this reveal about our relationship to Oscar movies or indeed our relationship to the cultural products of other times? I can tell you right now that it will reveal nothing. But it remains fun to speculate about what it might have revealed had it not been such an immediately and obviously flawed experiment. And now the graph....
On the left we have the combined score of all the films released in any given year (the years are plotted on the bottom axis). Since all IMDB user-ratings rate out of 10, the range of potential scores for any given year is 0-50 points.
But what are we to make of these results? It seems that quite contrary to my initial expectations, the films that have gained Oscar Nominations have in general increased in quality over the last twenty years. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that all you can deduce is that people have very short memories and rate contemporary movies more generously than older ones. But that still can't account for the horrific drops in quality in the mid and late-eightees...
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
It's curious to note that the graph starts to trend upward (and stays there) right around the time that the Internet started getting popular with the mainstream. The newest thing is always better because it's new...and as far as IMDB is concerned, new started right around 93/94.
→ Posted by: jkottke at February 15, 2002 7:54 AM
It would be interesting to take this further. Get a group of victims, erm I mean volunteers, and make them watch a selection of films from each year. Plot the results and see what happens. Would the most recent films receive higher scores?
→ Posted by: David at February 15, 2002 9:27 AM
Shouldn't you take some sort of appreciation-inflation into account?
Compare the increase in the number of 'mega' art shows - Vermeer, Van Gogh, that kind of thing. Thirty years ago they were exceptional; now they are de rigueur for any major museum and they draw ever larger crowds. Does that mean the paintings have gotten better?
Could it be that people simply feel that the importance of 'film' in general has increased, and therefore rate 'important' films higher?
→ Posted by: Koen at February 15, 2002 11:08 AM
I agree that last year (2001) has had a drought of good films; however, the best picture that I saw in this year's crop was "A Beautiful Mind." It's my SWAG (Scientific Wild Ass Guess) for the Best Picture Award. Being that Russell Crowe won the 73rd Oscar for Best Leading Actor in "Gladiator," it seems unlikely that Crowe would win 74th Oscar for Best Leading Actor. Most film pundits, however, would probably agree that the Oscar's are often unpredictable, so who knows?
The best film that I saw this year with no (0) doubt--in my mind--is "A Beautiful Mind."
The 3.5 stars rating seems correct to my way of thinking. There were no (0) 4 star(s) films this year (2001).
My URL has been deleted, and AT&T will soon change my email due to patent agreements.
Ken Allison
P.S. Make it a "Black Plastic Trashbag."
→ Posted by: Ken at February 18, 2002 6:12 AM
You could take the rating, over time, as the dependent variable, and then run some simple linear regressions (time series) to see what variables are influencing the dependent. You could include: number of movies released that year, number of reviewers (more reviewers may imply a reduction in the quality of the reviews), cost of movies to make in constant terms, etc.....
That way you can try and draw some concrete conclusions about just what is contributing to the trend that is so clearly displayed. Hmmmm, but I guess that may also mean that you have lost all sense of perspective in life and have become an econometric geek. Sorry Mum ... does that mean I have to go back up into the attic already? But it is only 9pm ... Mum!!!! Damn!
→ Posted by: Hewligan at February 28, 2002 8:51 PM
okay, so this would involve way too much work...but how about this: track down ratings from reviews of oscar-nominated films written when the films came out, and plot them instead. if the consensus among reviewers is anything to go by [and lord knows, i'm not arguing that it is] then you ought to be able to tell whether films are getting worse or better. although the nomination of a beautiful mind for best picture does, on the face of it, seem to indicate that they're definitely getting worse.
→ Posted by: marconi at March 2, 2002 11:17 PM
What about comparing the average rating of the nominated films (as at today's critical values) compared to the rating of the winning film (again, as at today's critical values). That could show us how we view the past's assessment of what was best in their day, and give us ammunition for mocking those older than ourselves - which is always a worthy project.
We would of course have to delete all evidence of this experiment, or kill everyone younger than ourselves, to avoid the same fate befalling ourselves of course. I chose the latter - they always make me feel fat so there would be a fringe benefit to the entire project.
→ Posted by: Tom Coates at April 10, 2002 3:39 PM
I think the reason for the curve heading upwards like that could be interpretted a little differently than most of you guys, but similar to the comment about 93/94 being when the net kicked in.
Before then, its fair enough to say that most net users were primarily academics, geeks, and on the more scientific / deskbound end of things. With this very generalised group of people, you tend to get a lot of critics as well as mindless "I LOVED IT!" comments, thus the average being lower.
Then of course we have the advent of the AOL generation, when people started voting "10" without thinking, just because the film may or may not have had Leonardo Di Caprio in it. Film criticism is out the window, geek chic sarcasm takes up a lesser percentage, and a lot of voters would tend to be more mainstream.
And we all know that the oscars are not a pinnacle of independent cinema or thought, so I do think that the gradual rise could more closely be linked to the gradual rise of "mainstream net-users" versus the 'old school' net-users of the cusp of the 80's/90's....
Just a thought.
The obvious exception to the rule being "Titanic" - the 1997 entry on the graph. Lets face it : that movie just plain SUCKED, and I knew that the dip in the graph was 1997 even before i squinted and looked ;)
→ Posted by: Demis at July 29, 2002 7:32 PM
I wonder if the quality factor would be higher if these films were chosen as best picture instead.
1982: Blade Runner
1985: Silverado
1987: Empire of the Sun
1990: GoodFellas
1994: The Shawshank Redemption
1996: Fargo
1997: L.A. Confidential
1998: Saving Private Ryan
2001: LOTR: The Fellowship of the Rings
2002: The Pianist
The omitted years were good choices, as far as I thought. But for the record, the biggest travesty the Academy has ever committed was not even nominating "2001: A Space Odyssey for Best Picture." Imagine that. A movie the AFI chooses as one if it's Top 100 films of all time, and it didn't even garner an Oscar nomination for BP.
And as for worst travesty for Best Actor, my vote goes for Jim Carrey getting the nomination snub TWO TIMES IN A ROW, both for "The Truman Show" and "Man on the Moon", the latter of which he should have won handily. If the Academy can support a genre-crossover actor like Tom Hanks, why the hell is Jim Carrey getting the cold shoulder by the Academy? Makes me sick.
→ Posted by: Tony at January 18, 2004 8:08 AM