2016 Oscar Nominations: Release Data
If you ever feel like all of the movies that get Oscar nominations seem to come out at the same time, then you wouldn’t be wrong. This year I noticed the first few Oscar movies trickling out in October, which then picked up (what felt like) drastically in November and December to the point of it almost being hard to keep them all straight.
This week I updated the spreadsheet with three new features: Distributing Studio, Release Date, and Release Month. All of that data I collected from BoxOfficeMojo.com (my new best friend, I am obsessed with the level of data that is available and I will be returning to look deeper once Oscars are over).
After updating the spreadsheet in Excel, I moved it over to R to graph again. I started by plotting the data on the finest scale, release date.
There’s not a whole lot of anything interesting to gather here. R wasn’t exactly willing to recognize the Date axis as being dates so it neither wanted to sort correct or leave space for the blank values like I wanted. You can also see that most individual weeks only had one movie, some had two, and then just a few had more than two.
So I decided to zoom out a little and graph based on Release Months instead.
This shows something a little more clear and interesting. The last 3 months are the biggest for Oscar movies to be released and January is a completely dead month (looking at the reviews for this January’s movies fits with this pattern pretty well).
I graphed the same data but with each movie labeled separately as well.
In the last two graphs it shows only the number of nominated movies that came out. But this doesn’t scale at all for how many nominations each month accounts for. So I repeated this graph, but instead of each movie only being counted once, now it’s counted for every nomination it received.
While the general pattern of the nominations looks pretty much the same, we can see that the scale has increased significantly. December had 10 Oscar nominated movies, but more than 30 nominations. And May — which had fewer nominated movies than September — surged in nominations.
If we now break this down by movies, we can see a little more of why.
Now we can see that the closing months of 2015 had both some very big movies (The Revenant, Spotlight, The Martian to name a few) but also many movies that received one or two nominations. Now we can also see why May had such a peculiar spike (if you couldn’t have guessed); Mad Max: Fury Road, which was released as a summer blockbuster but ended up being so critically acclaimed that it had nearly as many nominations as The Revenant.
One last thing that I was able to look at thanks to BoxOfficeMojo was the Distributing Studio for each movie. I was curious whether studios aim to have many movies nominated or just one movie getting lots of nominations.
Initially I plotted just the studios and how many nominations each’s movie received.
A few studios have a ton of nominations while a large handful have small numbers of nominations. Quite impressive is A24, which does the more independent movies, having more nominations than bigger studios like Universal and Paramount.
Looking at the breakdowns of the movies for each studio, it’s interesting to see the range. The studio with the most nominations is Buena Vista, with 4. Buena Vista distributes the Disney movies so that accounts for Star Wars, Cinderella, Inside Out, as well as Bridge of Spies. And other studios with a lot of nominations only have a few movies that are nominated, which is somewhat as I expected. I found most interesting, however, that there are some cases where a studio is competing against itself, such as The Martian and The Revenant both being Fox movies, and in every category except one that The Martian is nominated for, The Revenant is also nominated. Weinstein Company also has Carol and The Hateful Eight competing against each other in a few categories (Best Supporting Actress, Original Score, and Cinematography).
Although I didn’t find anything definitive or shocking, it was interesting to see where the majority of the nominations go to as far as on the month breakdown as well as studios. Of course, it’s hard to establish much of anything based on only one year. Later on I might throw in previous years to see how the pattern holds (for example: I expect the relatively high point in May is somewhat of a fluke).
Hopefully this time I’ll remember to upload my code to github before my computer restarts and I lose it.
In addition to the ggplot2 docs and stackoverflow I also found the link below super useful in making and modifying my graphs, both this week and last:
