The most massive collection of movie stats on the web has mountains of data than can be mined to forecast Oscarworthiness. Simply weighing ratings scores against known Oscar history gives us a quick and dirty indication of nominee likelihood. Daniel mentioned this in a comment a few minutes ago, just as I was putting the finishing touches on these charts — charts I’ve lifted from the IMDb Top 250. It’s a list that’s much maligned, but let’s not be snobs. Note that the bold face titles below are Best Picture nominees, and examine the merits of giving tens of thousands of IMDb voters a little respect.
The top 15 movies on IMDb include 11 Best Picture nominees (73%)
Expanding the list to 50 (which you can do by clicking the one above), we find 32 BP nominees (64%). Not counting the 4 foreign language titles, the 4 neglected Hitchcock films (wtf?), and the 2 David Fincher titles, the percentage rises to 80%. So unless your name is Hitchcock or you speak a funny language, your movie on this top 50 list stands a 4 out of 5 chance of getting a Best Picture nomination. Show me another list that predicts with those odds.
[Chart breakdown continues after the cut]
Before anyone cries foul about giving Fincher a Hitchcock dispensation, consider this: The Green Mile and The Cider House Rules were both nominated for Best Picture in 2000 instead of Fight Club. Really? Il Postino and Babe nominated for BP in 1996 instead of Se7en? Get out! Shortsighted flubs like that are already laughable, but in another 10 years won’t those omissions seem as ridiculous as Three Coins in a Fountain being nominated instead of Rear Window, The Alamo instead of Psycho, and Auntie Mame beating out Vertigo?
I know hindsight is 20/20, but we no longer have to wait 20 years for Cahiers du Cinema to tell us Hitchcock is a treasure. DVDs and the internet and more sophisticated moviegoer awareness have already helped elevate David Fincher to exalted auteur status.
Fincher is especially relevant to this chart analysis because he stands an excellent chance of becoming the 3rd director in 2008 with a film ranking high enough to land on the top 50 list. And interestingly enough, when you eliminate Hitchcock and Fincher as extraordinary ‘oops’ in this formula, it leaves another prominent director with two movies in the top 50 who’s yet to have been Oscar nominated: Christopher Nolan, with Memento and The Dark Knight. (In fact, counting The Prestige, 3 of 5 major films in Nolan’s entire career are in the IMDb top 100.)
AMPAS never woke up in time to properly honor Hitchcock (though he received Best Director nominations for BP-nodless Psycho and Rear Window). Will Fincher and Nolan break the Hitchcock curse? The curse of being too visionary for their time? Or will they become modern-day victims of the 20% blandification quota of Oscar nominee history?
In recent years, the bland titles are becoming more scarce on the Oscar roster, and voters are more aware of the luminous talents whose films become instant classics as soon as their impact sinks in. America is undergoing a seismic shift in national attitude this year. Will Hollywood rock with some landmark aftershocks of its own?
21 Responses for "IMDb Scores as Oscar Indicators"
Never mind wtf about the Hitchcock titles on this list that AMPAS didn’t deem worthy of a Best Picture nomination. Isn’t it a travesty that all these movies didn’t get the Oscar attention they deserved?
Valid points about the IMDb List, one that I reference every bit as much as Sight & Sound and the AFI Master List. On the other hand, though, the IMDb List is mostly good at gauging how well older movies have held up to the average movie geek. Looking at the 50 top-rated films of the 2000s, only 13 are Best Picture-nominated (10 if you take out the Lord of the Rings Trilogy). Also, joining Fincher, Christopher Nolan gets to add The Prestige to his list of popular unnominated films. So even though The Dark Knight is currently the highest-rated film of the decade, I’m not placing money bets just yet.
This list is so unbearably macho and shortsighted. Do “The Matrix”, “Memento”, “The Dark Knight”, “The Professional” and “American History X” REALLY belong on a list of the 200 best of all time?
IMDb top 250 is pretty stupid when you have movies like “Pirates of the Caribbean” or even “The Dark Knight”, who, as people think, is better than “Casablanca”. I say NO WAY.
Ryan, I have a soft spot in my heart for “Babe.” I thought it was an exceptionally charming film, a classic of its genre, and as deserving of a nomination for best picture as “Seven” or even (in a different year) “Beauty and the Beast.” To me, “Babe” is a perfect example of a film that would typically be ignored by the Academy because, like the “Dark Knight,” it doesn’t fit into the pattern of the Academy’s nomination history.
Hi, this is a really interesting post. I’ve been working on numerical analyses and Oscar predictions for a while, even inventing an algorithm to try and predict the nominees (so far, I’ve gone 4/5 both years). This summer I took a look at Metacritic scores as indicators of best picture nominees (http://yesterdayssalad.wordpress.com/2008/08/09/best-of/) and recently I used the same metric to assess the chances of Rachel Getting Married getting a nomination (doesn’t look good). I love the site, and I’m glad to see articles like this one.
Interesting. I don’t think the Academy’s going to go for bland this year. They’ve gone edgy with No Country and There Will Be Blood last year having the most noms, they aren’t suddenly going to go all Flash of Genius on us. At this point, I’d bet my left kidney The Dark Knight gets a BP nom.
I’m really fond of Babe too, w.j. I almost left it out of the argument because, as you say, it’s not a typical Best Picture nominee, and I like to see the traditional thinking shaken up.
I ran into the same problem trying to find a good reason to be upset at North by Northwest not getting a BP nom. Although it’s one of my favorite late Hitchcock films, it’s hard to find a movie to disparage among the 1959 Best Picture nominees:
# Ben-Hur – William Wyler
# Anatomy of a Murder – Otto Preminger
# The Diary of Anne Frank – George Stevens
# The Nun’s Story – Fred Zinnemann
# Room at the Top – Jack Clayton
Yes, I still like North by Northwest better than any of these. It’s aged better, and there are too many classic sequences that I could watch again and again. But that doesn’t mean the 1959 nominees are unworthy.
sb, To Kill a Mockingbird, Amelie, Sunset Blvd, Casablanca — macho? The movies you call into question include some seminal milestones that have been enormously influential. There might not be any fried green tomatoes, ya-ya’s or traveling pants on the list, but male-centrism is a fact of cinema history and raw action in a movie doesn’t prevent it from being deeply meaningful.
Anyway, the point of this post was not to heap praise on the IMDb list. It’s meant to point out a relation between movie fans who vote at IMDb and the movie makers who vote for Oscars. Maybe you’ve noticed, Oscar movies are predominantly male-centric too.
Dash–how did TDK fare on your algorithm?
“Anyway, the point of this article was not to heap praise on the IMDb list. It’s meant to draw a relation between movie fans who vote there and the moviemakers who vote for Oscars. Oscar movies are predominantly male-centric too.”
Good post. The only problem is that I would venture to guess that most of the movies (on the top 250) benefited by being nominated, and not the other way around. That is, their success on the list didn’t play much of a role in whether they would be nominated. Yet, the fact that they were nominated for best picture probably played a greater role in their placement on the list.
awardscircuit.com
Ryan,
North by Northwest is your favorite Hitchcock? Mine too. See we are sooooo much alike.
Empire Strikes Back should have been nominated, and won for 1980.
One would think, Keith. I’m sure you’re right about older movies benefiting from their prior Oscar reputations. Films more than 10 years old would necessarily come the IMDb list with their pedigree already established by other awards and lists (like the AFI Top 100s).
But in fact, last year No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood were already secure in the mid-20’s on the list in December. Juno had landed around 100, leaping onto the list within days of its release. Even Atonement kept blinking on and off the list at the very bottom, once rising as high as 237. (I remember, because I was on the verge of losing a bet). Ratatouille and The Bourne Ultimatum has also appeared on the Top 250, long before the nominations came out.
The only BP nominee from last year that didn’t show up on IMDb before the nominations were announced was Michael Clayton. (Consequently, I didn’t predict it for the final 5, so my cute little theory failed me).
Many of us still believe The Bourne Ultimatum is a superior film to Michael Clayton and feel it would’ve made a more interesting, bolder nominee. (And by “many of us” mainly I mean “me.”)
North by Northwest is not my ultimate favorite Hitchcock, Rob. But it circles my head in geosynchronous orbit with 4 or 5 of its equals. I can never definitively pinpoint my favorite Hitchcock film — except to cop out and say “whichever was the last one I watched.”
But yeah, North by Northwest is in the Pantheon, for sure. It’s comfort food Hitch for me. It’s the Hitch I can spin up on DVD anytime I need a reminder that movies can be elegant fluid dreams of masterful structural perfection.
Well, it’s a little too early to use our algorithm on this year’s movies, since most of the data (guild noms, critics’ prizes) has yet to come out. Right now we’re mostly trying to find comparables for each movie and The Dark Knight scores highly on that front. In the last 11 years, there’s only one year where the highest grossing best picture nominee grossed less than 100 million, 2005 and Brokeback Mountain. Box office is clearly a factor–how else do you explain movies like Seabiscuit being nominated?
The question is, how much of a factor is it? Well, I can say that the average best picture nom over the last 10 years has a metacritic score of 81. The Aviator scored 77, Titanic scored 74, Seabiscuit 72, Gladiator 64, and The Sixth Sense 64, all of which grossed over 100 million dollars. The sixth sense was the highest grossing movie of 99, and Titanic, obviously, the highest grossing movie of 97, if not all time. So it seems likely that people will vote for “below average” movies if the gross is high enough. Since Dark Knight rates as an average-slightly above average movie by this metric, it seems likely that it will be recognized.
All of this is to leave aside what is probably the Dark Knight’s biggest comparable: The Lord of the Rings (take your pick, but the first two are the most favourable). Both are action heavy movies based on popular literary sources that show a surprising level of intellect for their genre, along with skillful direction and fine acting. All were above average for a best picture nominee, and were either the highest or second highest grossing movie of their year. So I don’t know how much Box Office influences decisions, but there certainly is a correlation, at least for 1 movie a year, and this year that favors the Dark Knight.
a NONSENSE list
Dash, “Star Wars Episode I – The Phantom Menace” was the highest grossing film of 1999, not “The Sixth Sense.” And never take the IMDb Top 250 seriously… what a ridiculous popularity contest of a list.
You’re absolutely right. “The Sixth Sense” was the second highest.
Good point Ryan.
But most of the films in bold were nominated way before IMDB had any relevance (late 90s at best)
Would it not make more sense to look at the films released after that time, and see if they were on the list before receiving a nod? I don’t think showing the numbers as if is particularly accurate.
“Would it not make more sense to look at the films released after that time, and see if they were on the list before receiving a nod?”
It would make more sense, Keith, and it would have more relevance too. But I don’t know where to find a reliable history of moments in time on the Top 250. The list constantly shifts; titles come and go. There’s no record of what the rankings looked like a year ago. I really only started paying close attention these couple of years, and my memory doesn’t go back further than 2006.
All I can say with certainty is that The Departed, Little Miss Sunshine, and Pan’s Labyrinth were popular favorites that all showed up on the Top 250 soon after they premiered (and way before the nominations). Though not a BP nominee, Pan’s Labyrinth came as close as any foreign language film in recent memory to breaking through to Oscar’s upper echelon. Nominated for six Oscars, and won 3. The Departed and Little Miss Sunshine came away with top nominations and the major wins. IMDb voters were right.
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Interesting that scanning down the list, looking for ranking of films in recent years, I see that Into the Wild is now at #136. Last year, in the run up to Oscars, it wasn’t in the top 250 at all. The only reason I remember this is because I felt we had a personal stake in supporting Into the Wild here at AD, and I was keeping an eye on it. I think we were all stunned at how this movie got snubbed, but now that it’s been seen on DVD its reputation had increased and we can feel somewhat vindicated.
(Paramount Vantage gave Into the Wild an honorable FYC campaign but it was too late — they’d blown the initial premiere and gave it an excruciating slow roll-out across the country. I didn’t get to see it until months after it was released. Paramount Vantage was caught in a phenomena I’ve called “Studio Sophie’s Choice” — Paramount Vantage had so many strong contenders, but could only choose the strongest children. There was only room for 2 or 3 on the lifeboat. Who did they chose to pull onboard while they let Into the Wild sink? No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, The Savages.)
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So, months after last year’s Oscars are history, what does the emergence of Into the Wild on the Top 250 tell us? I’d liketo think that it shows there are titles on the list that earn their esteem regardless of whether or not they got any Oscar love. And I’ll use this example as skimpy evidence to back up my belief that the IMDb list evolves in ways unrelated to awards.
My contention all along is the cause and effect works in the other direction: quality films that are recognized first on IMDb — throughout the year — have a good chance of being the same high-profile favorites that Oscar looks to fill it’s “sure thing” slots.
Whatever the effect, it can only be observed as it’s happening, since we can’t know for sure if rankings from 4 or 5 years ago were any indication of anything. Hot films fall out of the tip 50, and many fall off the list altogether as the years dim the fan base enthusiasm.
But that’s another reason to keep an eye on what movies are popping up on the IMDb list — because the Top 250 an excellent snapshot of the zeitgeist.
For example, it might be important to note that last year’s assumptions about Into the Wild might have been wrong. The conventional wisdom was that “the Academy isn’t wild about Sean Penn.” But if the IMDb list is now demonstrating that Sean Penn’s stock might be valued higher than presumed, this reappraisal of his popularity might have significant implications for Milk.
Sorry for the lengthy dissection. I’m not as obsessed with this theory as it might seem
. But I do think it’s a factor worth considering, and it’s easy enough to explain why.
“Daniel mentioned this in a comment a few minutes ago, just as I was putting the finishing touches on these charts”
We all know you saw my comment and rushed to put this post together as fast as you could.
I definitely agree with what you’re saying. I have to admit to being slightly addicted to IMDB and the politics of the top 250. While its true that it is really a popularity contest, what’s so bad about seeing every once in a while what regular movie viewers think? And they do get it right a lot of the time.
When I was talking about TDK’s top 250 ranking before, it was mostly because I was giving reasons to back up the claim that TDK is the cultural phenomenon of the year. Now that you’ve put it the way you did, Ryan, with all your lovely stats and screenshots, I can see how it shows TDK’s BP chances, as well.
I tried in 2008 to use the IMDB score to explain (and it turned out I was wrong) why the odds were huge that Dark Knight had to be nominated for something major. It is am amazing anomaly that a movie with an IMDB 8.9 winds up with no nomination for picture, director or screenplay. When you also factor in its 8.5 score at Rotten Tomatoes and a 1 billion dollar box office, you have one of the most statistically unusual results of which I am aware. Is it any surprise that it has changed the oscars, leading to the 10 BP nomination field, silly as that may be.
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