What Happens After You Win an Oscar?
Supposedly Richard Feynman once said, “the Nobel Prize will be the tombstone on all great work”. Ironically he went on to win the prize for groundbreaking work, but I always thought he raised a valid question which I think was ‘what happens when after years of passionate work and putting in your all, you finally receive recognition at the highest level’?
Most disciplines have an award at the top. One that’s highly coveted, more prestigious than all the others and reserved for experts, the best of the best — The Nobel Prize, Fields Medal, Pulitzer Prize and so on. Becoming an expert requires a commitment of mind, body and time while navigating the many inevitable obstacles that get in the way of achieving success. More often than not it’s only those with passion and a fire inside who can surmount the largest of obstacles to produce truly groundbreaking work. But what happens when people achieve success and recognition for their work? Rarely do those who practice in a field and win an award do so more than once.
Is this because people genuinely only have enough in them to produce one piece of groundbreaking work in their lifetime? Or is it because that once they receive this recognition, they no longer have the drive or passion to produce and overcome obstacles like they used to?
This last question got me thinking about how I could find a data-driven answer. But when talking about passion and creativity, we’re talking about variables that on their own don’t have any direct measures aside from rewards. There’s no ‘passion scale’ or ‘creativity spectrum’, just acknowledgment when work is extraordinary. So then how can we measure passion before and after recognition? This got me thinking about the field of cinema and a certain actor.
The McConnaissance
Remember Matthew McConaughey? Between 2011 and 2014 he was experiencing a revival of his career, taking on more nuanced and cerebral roles than the usual handsome, romantic heartthrob characters he was known for. He performed in a slew of critically acclaimed and high grossing films such as “Mud”, “The Lincoln Lawyer”, “Bernie”, “Interstellar”, and a stint on television in one of my favourite shows — “True Detective”. Many critics referred this time as the “McConaissance”. He truly worked on revitalizing his career and this time eventually culminated in him receiving an Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Ron Woodroof in “Dallas Buyers Club”.
However, since then, his career has been quiet with only a handful of lacklustre appearances in films such as “The Dark Tower”, “Beach bum” “The Gentleman”. In almost the same amount of time that the “McConaissance” was declared, it ended. So to our question, did Matthew McConaughey lose whatever it was that drove him to portray roles to critical acclaim? Is this a correct observation to make? And is this a common occurrence among other actors after they achieve the highest award in acting?
The Academy Award For Best Actor
Let’s first look at how we can come up with a measure for creativity and passion. The Academy Award, more commonly known as the Oscar, for Best Actor/Actress, is given out once a year and is probably the most highly coveted award in the field of cinema. It is given “in honor of an actor who has delivered an outstanding performance in a leading role while working within the film industry”. Only a handful of artists have won the award more than once. In fact, in its 92 years of running, 83 men have won “Best Actor”, and 76 women have taken home the title of “Best Actress”.
In addition to this, an outstanding performance occurs more often than not in a critically acclaimed film. In fact the average ratings for films in which there was a winner for best actor/actress on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes is 88% / 86% respectively.
With that, maybe we can look at the ‘quality’ of films via proxy variable — in this case, ratings — before and after an actor or actress won the Academy Award, as a measure of the quality of their career. We can use the scores from Rotten Tomatoes — a site that may be familiar to you, but briefly how it works — they are an aggregator that take all reviews in all forms and scales and simply take whether or not the review was positive or “fresh” (thumbs up, above 60% or 3 stars) and give a score that “represents the percentage of professional critic reviews that are positive for a given film”. I added a section in the methodology if you’re keen on understanding further.
Measuring The McConnaissance
We started our discussion looking at Matthew McConaughey so now let’s look back at the question in his context. The figure below shows his career from 1990 to 2020 and the ratings the films he acted in received. In the late 90s, he seemed to be performing in some highly-rated films. Yet something changed between 2000 and 2010 where the opposite was true.
During “The McConnaisance”, between 2010 and 2015, he was experiencing a definite height of his career that seemed to culminate in his 2013 Oscar. But what’s interesting to note is between 2015 and 2020 McConaughey acted in a greater number of films than any 5 year period before. In addition, there seems to be a larger spread in the quality of these films.
During “The McConnaisance”, between 2010 and 2015, he was experiencing a definite height of his career that seemed to culminate in his 2013 Oscar. But what’s interesting to note is between 2015 and 2020 McConaughey acted in a greater number of films than any 5 year period before. In addition, there seems to be a larger spread in the quality of these films.
Is the variance in this quality a result of his acting? Perhaps his critical accomplishments net him enough demand that he could afford to act in films that may offer a higher return in box office success, but not in ‘quality’ of the role. Regardless he’s kept busy so his drive to continue acting has not wavered.
Whatever the answer, there was a definite change in his behaviour over the 6 years after his Oscar win from the 6 years prior to it. We can explore this further by looking at the average ratings of the films he was in over this 12 year period and also extract his highest-rated film of each year.
Taking time = 0 as the year he won the Academy Award, it’s evident that there was a gradual incline in the quality of the films he performed in. In fact, the average ratings largely seem to follow the same trends from about 4 years until his award. At this point, however, there starts to show a difference between the two metrics. We can gather from this that while Matthew McConaughey’s career since has included some very well-received films, there’ve been quite a few movies of a lesser quality bringing down his yearly average rating.
Is This A Common Occurrence?
So in the case of Matthew McConaughey, we have two sets of information indicating some sort of behaviour change. But what about other actors? Did their pre/post success follow the same pattern? We can compare them along the same lines as we did with McConaughey, standardizing the year they won the academy award as year 0 and looking at 6 years before and after.
Between the years of 2000 and 2014, there were only a few actors who won the academy award who had careers prolific enough to have data for 6 years before and after. We’re going to take a closer look at 4 of them alongside Matthew McConaughey.
At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be as visible a pattern before and after. However, looking closer, it becomes interesting to note that at time = 0 (the year of winning the award) actors, in general, are experiencing a peak in their careers, and more interestingly, seem to be observing a short term decline in their ‘best performance’ of the year. Looking at the longer-term trends they somewhat stabilize but what’s fascinating is what seems like a ‘hangover’ to their win.
Can we now say with any certainty that an Academy Award win leads to a dip in performance? It certainly seems that something happens, with some actors being able to bounce back quicker than others. Taking a sample set from best actress winners in the same vein as actors, we can see a similar pattern with a decline in performance in the short term.
Where Do We Take This?
The study illuminated some insightful patterns among academy award winners. But what do we take from this? Do we stop giving out awards to encourage creative work? That seems a little far fetched, especially considering that perhaps it’s in pursuit of this recognition that creatives find their drive. I find this is reflected more and more in today’s society. We concern ourselves so much with likes, views, comments and followers that a lot of drive to create content is fuelled by these metrics.
This ultimately raises an observation that in acting, there is no objective indicator of performance — or at least not one that I’m aware of. The difficulty lies in determining a quantitative measure that does not currently exist. With that in mind, it would be worthwhile to develop a more complete measure of an actor’s performance within a given year. Maybe this framework or model could include additional measures such as the actor’s time on-screen, the number of roles they acted in within a given year, the box-office earnings from their movies, the pay they received, along with the overall critic rating for the film itself. This metric could perhaps then be extrapolated as an actor’s score — deepening and complexifying the rating system that we are taking from Rotten Tomatoes, to better quantify creativity. Perhaps we can even offer a data-driven approach to acting that artists, dancers and even amateur actors on Social Media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok have been following for years.
We can also look at other fields. For example, athletes don’t seem to follow the same success patterns as actors or Nobel Prize winners. Fairly often, star athletes tend to reign over many years and amalgamate multiple wins while at the top of their game across all forms of sports.
Micheal Jordan played 15 NBA seasons, out of which he won 6 NBA championships with the Chicago Bulls and to this day Jordan is the all-time 2nd highest scorer of the NBA. Jordan’s reign and success, however, was objectively measured and easily quantifiable. One could argue that his achievement of the highest levels of recognition in the sport, was a direct outcome of effort and quality of his work. This correlation between the quality of work and recognition seems much more linear than the Academy Awards rubric for “winning” the Oscar which is neither objective nor static over time. And this is basketball, where it could be argued that the highest level of success in the sport — winning an NBA championship, could still be attributed to the larger team, rather than simply one individual.
When we turn to look at other more individualistic sports than basketball such as Olympic sprinting or Tennis, there emerges perhaps an even stronger correlation between the quality of work and recognition/success.
Ultimately, actors provide us with a great source of entertainment. One could argue that during this time, locked indoors and unable to go outside, we’ve turned to them. They help get us through the evenings and keep us company giving us an outlet to feel our emotions or escape from them. So they should be rewarded. But the more so applauded for work they create in such a risky field with no guarantees and no safety nets. Maybe we can learn to do this as well. With that, I’ll end with a thought from the great Rodney Mullen.
“Just find joy in what you do for the sake of it. And then recognize how you’re being shaped in the process, and hopefully, over time, you become a better person through it.”
Methodology
There were a couple of ways I went about structuring my thoughts and gathering the data. Below I go over some of my thought process and what I did, but feel free to reach out if you have any questions!
Exploring The Questions
The first step I needed to take was to identify a measure for ‘quality’. Cinema is a subjective field. A film may be lauded by some but criticized by others, and outside of awards, there aren’t really any metrics to measure individual performance as such.
However, there are metrics that one can attach to the quality of a film, such as ratings and box office performance. But these metrics are difficult to standardize. Take in the case of movie critic reviews. All over the world, critics and journalists (professional or amateur) go to screenings, absorb the film and share their thoughts sometimes attaching a score that could be anything from a 1–10 scale, 5-star rating or simply give a thumbs up/thumbs down. Furthermore, between all of these systems, it’s difficult to make sense of the subjective nature of scoring. Legendary film critic Roger Ebert once reflected on how his style of rating movies changed over time according to what his readership was looking for. He found they weren’t looking for a ‘review’ of the film, but simply advice on whether or not they should spend their evening watching the film in question.
There are a few ways to solve this problem, but as I briefly touched on, review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes seems to have done it best. Simply, as you may be familiar with this, they take all reviews in all their forms and aggregate whether or not the review was positive or “fresh” (thumbs up, above 60% or 3 stars) and give a score that “represents the percentage of professional critic reviews that are positive for a given film”. As this system allows for reviews from all sorts of systems to be aggregated, Rotten Tomatoes is often one of the more trusted or go-to indicators of public opinion.
Getting The Data
To attempt to answer the questions above, I was going to need data — a lot of it…but also not all of it. To do this and help draw out some of the relevant overarching data, I made a few assumptions. Firstly, the focus was on ‘modern’ cinema, starting from 2000 to 2014. Movie rating systems evolved around this time and due to the growth of the internet, this is when the number of reviews available grew and aggregators such as Rotten Tomatoes seem to give a better indication of critical acclaim. Kind of like how it’s easier to trust a restaurant rated 4.2 with 1000 reviews than one rated 5 with 8 reviews.
Secondly, the driver for this was based on a long and winding thought process that started with Matthew McConaughey. So I based the timeframe on a pattern of performance pre and post his Academy Award in 2013 to now. As such, I want to look at patterns within the same time frame of +/- 6 years from an actor’s first academy award win.
The data was collected from two sources. I wrote a Python script to0 scrape Wikipedia to get a list for all Best Actor and Actress. With that, I used the data and to guide a further web scrape of each winner’s filmography page on Rotten Tomatoes. I’m happy to share my code, just drop me a line!
Note - I originally published this on my personal website. If you’re curious, head on over, I write about Data Science, technology and reflect on books I’ve read.
