Oscar Bait vs. Blockbuster: Best Picture Nominees in a Changing Movie-Viewing Landscape
By Maura Foley
On Sunday, we’ll find out which movies Academy members loved, but what about average Americans? Which nominees did the general US public see this year? How does popularity and award show recognition relate?
One of my favorite parts of working at Civis is fielding surveys. Surveying Americans (quickly and easily thanks to our survey science team!) allows us to question or confirm conventional wisdom, and gauge how common opinions or consumer behaviors are in the total US population.
An area where I know I’m an outlier is movies. I go to the movies about twice a month and have seen all but two of the films nominated for Best Picture. In anticipation of the Academy Awards this Sunday, we asked a sample of 2,200 Americans about the 2018 Best Picture contenders. With a few notable exceptions (Titanic, Lord of the Rings) it is rare for high-grossing big-budget films to garner a nomination for best picture, hence the colloquialism “Oscar bait.” Popularity and Oscar prospects are often mutually exclusive, which we saw confirmed in the conjoint analysis we performed last year. The body of individuals who select the winner, the oft-mentioned “Academy” is not a representative sample of the US adult population, unlike our surveys. However, as FiveThirtyEight rightly points out in their great pre-Oscar analysis, there’s been huge turnover in the Academy in the last five years, so the existing trends in Oscar-winning may not hold. We sure got a shock last year with Moonlight’s surprising and dramatic win.
This year we tested the popularity of each nominated film. To do this we added two questions to two waves of our weekly omnibus survey:
1. Which of these Best Picture nominees have you seen?
2. How did you see them? (In theater, streaming, Redbox or other)
3. What, in your opinion, was the best movie of 2017?
Grab the popcorn (at home)
What we found was that a majority of the weighted survey population (65.2%) have not seen any of the nominated films. This didn’t surprise us. In previous movie-going surveys, we’ve found that almost 25% of Americans haven’t been inside a movie theater in the last year! I am in a particularly lonely group having seen seven of the nominated films, only 0.1% of Americans have seen the same number of Oscar nominees as I have!
Get Out and Dunkirk are the most popular movies. This may be due to the fact that those movies came out before the typical “Oscars season” of October-November when films are released in time to be considered, but late enough to still be in theaters to experience a bump in ticket sales when the awards are given out in (typically) February. These films have been in-market longer and also were released wider than many of their competitors. As a comparison point, almost 40% of a weighted sample of Americans indicated having seen Wonder Woman, the fourth-highest-grossing film of 2017.
This also highlights a general trend in movie-going: Americans are going to the movie theater less. According to Box Office Mojo, 2017 tickets sales were the lowest in 25 years. Because both Dunkirk and Get Out have been out since February, they’re available on streaming services, which we see borne out in our results:
Dunkirk and Get Out’s advantage in popularity appears to be driven by the fact that they are also least likely to have been seen in theaters, and more likely to be viewed at home via Redbox or streaming.
Different crowds, different popularity contests
Next, I wanted to test the previously observed relationship between popularity of a film and its Oscar hopes. Get Out, which took the country by storm in February with its high-grossing release and domination of the pop culture conversation, is a strong contender, which is atypical for a movie of its popularity, especially in the horror genre, which the Academy rarely rewards.
I took expert predictions from GoldDerby.com and correlated them against the percentage of the population that saw them:
If we include Get Out, there is a weak positive correlation between the number of experts who pick it to win and the movie’s popularity. Granted, this is not statistically as we only have a sample size of nine. There is a slightly stronger positive correlation between popularity of the nominees and the existing awards or nominations the titles have received thus far this awards season, as aggregated by FiveThirtyEight. These are good leading indicators of who will win, so that’s semi-good news for Get Out, my personal choice for Best Picture.
But, if we exclude Get Out, the correlation flips, and there is a moderate negative correlation between popularity and expert choice to win, which implies Get Out is a relative outlier in that it is both popular and critically acclaimed. Get Out appears to be, for this year, the exception to an existing trend of popularity and critical acclaim rarely occurring together.
If we ask average Americans their favorite movies of 2017, we get results more consistent with box office performance. Popular films include Star Wars (8%), Wonder Woman (5%) and Coco (2%). Good news for Dunkirk: it leads in self-reported favorites among Oscar nominees, with 4% of respondents saying its the best film they saw in 2017. Shoutout to the respondent who said Bad Moms: Christmas was the best film of 2017. Happy to see Mila Kunis fans out there! And for the person who loved Boss Baby, I wish there was an irony indicator in text boxes.
