Academy Awards biased towards some genres?
My educated guess is that the Academy Awards are not biased towards specific genres. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), a professional honorary organization, maintains a voting membership of 5,783 as of 2012 [1]. This organization votes for the movie to be chosen as the best movie. I think that since it is not decided by just a panel of very limited members, but a group of size 6000 members, the possibility of bias reduces substantially.
Introduction
I think this question is of great interest as the Academy Awards are considered the most prestigious awards in the movie industry and it is quintessential for it to be bias-free. There is no official organization or group that keeps a check if there exists bias in the awards, thus it is essential to find out whether or not that is the case.
There have been various reports indicating that the Academy Awards are biased to- wards specific genres like romantic historical epics, biographical dramas, romantic dramedies, and family melodramas[2]. This motivated me to find out if this is true or is it a speculation. There have been studies that have tried to answer this question, for example IbTimes found that Sci Fi, Foreign Films And Horror Movies never get Best Picture Nominations. However, these studies establish that the awards are biased without considering public opinion of genres of movies. I thought that in order to truly determine if the organization is biased towards some genre, it would be crucial to check if the general movie-watching population thinks the same about those genres or not.
Methodology
These are the steps I went through for answering my question:
1.) Extracted the genres of the movies which have received academy awards as well as nominations for the best movie since the inception of the awards, i.e 1929. I did this using using IMDBpy. It is a python library, to which when we feed in a list of movies, we can extract various information about the movie like language, cast, director, genre and so on.
2.) Extracted the genres of the movies which are rated the highest by users on IMDB. IMDB maintains a list of top 250 highest rated movies by users. I used this data to com- pare with the data I have extracted from academy awards list. Then using the multiple charts visualization, I compared the two set of data. The different properties are the dif- ferent genres like drama, comedy, historical and so on. The x-axis in each of the graph represent the data collected from Academy Awards and the data collected from IMDB. The y-axis will indicate the percentage of movies that are of a particular genre. If there is a big discrepancy between the two for multiple categories, then we can establish the fact that there exists a bias. The reason why this comparison is important is that if suppose like the reports suggest that drama, romantic, historical based movies win more awards, and if the majority of the public (IMDB Top 250) also thinks the same, then it can be said that its not that the organization is biased, it is just that those specific genres are appreci- ated more by everyone. However, if there is a big difference between them, it can indicate a bias.
Results
Here are the results which I found out.
As we can see from the results that Academy Awards seem to be biased against some genres. Few points to notice from this result:
1. Sci-Fi and Horror Movies have not won an award nor have gotten any nomination.
2. Academy Awards seem more biased towards the Biography, Drama, History, Musical and Romance Genres.
3. Academy Awards seem to be biased against the Action, Adventure, Crime, Fantasy, Mystery and Thriller Genres.
4. The genres which seem to match with general user’s ratings are Comedy, Family, Film- Noir, Music, Sport, War and Western Categories.
Potential Pitfalls
Potential pitfalls I think I could have made during this analysis are:
1. The assumption that I have made is that IMDB Top 250 Movies list reflects the choice of the majority of the population. This may not be the case. A lot of people would not prefer IMDB and not vote on it. This might make the results not accurate. To counter this, we can gather as much as data as possible to eliminate bias. We can gather data from other websites like rotten tomatoes, meta critic and so on. To gather more data, we could also make an interactive Facebook quiz wherein people would answer what their top 20 favorite movies were and use that data to add to our repository of data.
2.) It might be hard to decide the boundary between declaring the awards are biased or not biased. For example, if the difference of percentages in the drama category is 10%, but for other categories, the difference is ¡5%, should we declare that the awards are bi- ased or not? To workaround this issue, we could use various techniques in statistics like cosine similarity to check how different two sets of data are and then with this help we could make a decision more accurately.
Conclusion
My initial educated guess turned out to be false according to the results I have obtained. There seems to be a bias with regard to some genres. Specially Sci-Fi and Horror movies which have not even got a nomination. I cannot think of a reason why this would have happened. As for the other categories, some of the genres like Drama and Romance have got a higher number of nominations and wins than other genres. I think this can be attributed to the fact that people in general favor these categories. I would want to do more research on this if possible.
References
[1] Web Archive
[2] Wikipedia
