Best Picture vs. Box Office: Is Oscar Still Representing the Popular Taste?

The Academy Awards, commonly and now officially known as the Oscars, are awards for artistic and technical merit for the film industry. They are usually given out in March during a telecast ceremony in Hollywood, making it the oldest entertainment award ceremony in the world.

However, as the top-notch grand ceremony that is supposed to garner much attention from people, it has attracted increasingly fewer audience than expected in recent years. We thoroughly analyzed the annual lists of the Oscars from 2013 to 2022 and drew the following conclusions:

• The viewership has been declining, indicating that the award ceremony is not universally recognized. The divide between audience favorite movies and the ones nominated for Academy Awards is increasing more and more.

• It is extremely challenging for movies to excel both commercially and artistically. The last time a movie with the highest-grossing box office won the Academy Award for Best Picture was 20 years ago, with movies like The Lord of the Rings and Titanic.

• In 2021, the ratio of the box office of the Oscar-winning Best Picture and the highest-grossing movie hit the historical low in the last decade.

The Intensifying Gap between the taste of the general public and the taste of the Academy's Voters

The voters of the Academy Award consist of industry professionals who may have different aesthetics and values compared to the general audience. Therefore, their professional judgment may not align with what the public enjoys. The highest-grossing movie of the year is expected to be the audience's favorite.

Due to this aesthetic disparity, the audience may not even be familiar with the voters, leading to suspicion and dissatisfaction with the Oscars. This could be a main reason for the declining viewership over the years, decreasing from 43.7 million in 2014 to just 10.4 million in 2021.

Wikipedia also mentions that "the audience rating tends to decline when films with low box office revenues are nominated for the Best Picture." In 2008, the Academy Award for Best Picture was No Country for Old Men, which had a gross of only $164 million. Despite being the 80th anniversary of the Academy Awards, the ceremony recorded its lowest audience rating at that time, with only 18.66% viewership.

A Herculean Task to Balance Business and Art

The highest-grossing film represents its commercial value, while the Academy Award for Best Picture symbolizes its artistic excellence. However, in recent years, the commercial value of the Oscar-Winning Best Picture has been comparatively low. For instance, in 2021, the box office of the highest-grossing film Spider-Man: No Way Home was 852 times higher than the Oscar-Winning Best Picture CODA.

It is an arduous task to find a balance between business and art. It has been 20 years since the highest-grossing film also won the Best Picture Academy Award, which happened with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in 2003 and Titanic in 1997. We can only anticipate when the next highest-grossing film of the year will also win the Best Picture Academy Award. Let us look forward to that moment.

Decline in Both Oscars Viewership and the ratio of the box office of the Oscar-winning Best Picture and the highest-grossing movie

We collected the box office of the Best Picture winners and the highest-grossing films over the last decade. By calculating the ratio between their box office, we found that the lowest ratio 0.12% was recorded in 2021.

Meanwhile, we also got the annual viewership of the Academy Awards Ceremony, which reached a new low at just 10.4 million viewers in 2021, which was partially expected due to it being known as the COVID-19 ceremony.

In 2021, Oscar-winning Best Picture experienced low box office, while the viewership for the ceremony hit an all-time low. This suggests a potential correlation between the two -- a lack of recognition from the audience towards the Oscars' criteria for judgment.

Methodology

We analyzed the viewership for the Oscars ceremony, and discovered a consistent annual decline since 2013, culminating in the lowest in 2021.

To analyze the films nominated for Oscars over the past decade, we obtained the lists from Wikipedia. Through Box Office Mojo, we collected the box office of each film and the highest-grossing film of each year.

With this comprehensive analysis, we compared the box office of the Oscar-winning Best Picture and the highest-grossing film.

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