What wins More Often? Director with Pic, or Most Noms

Reader Marshall Flores has done the research and delivers the stats.¬† Director wins. That doesn’t mean the same will play out this year, of course.¬† It just means that when you hear people say “the film with the most nominations wins most often.” True, but only if the film also wins director. Without a director win, it is much more rare than a film without the most nominations but a strong director at the helm. As you’ll see.

Marshall writes, “Starting in 1929 (skipping 1928 b/c there were two winners in both BP and BD), Director has matched BP 62 out of 81 times (77%), while the film with the most nominations has won BP 56 out of 81 times (69%).

Obviously, there’s a lot of overlap with Directing wins and having the most nominations. There are 17 films that won BP and BD w/o being the nomination leader: All Quiet on the Western Front, It Happened One Night, How Green Was My Valley, Casablanca, The Lost Weekend, Hamlet, The Bridge on the River Kwai, My Fair Lady, A Man for All Seasons, Midnight Cowboy, Annie Hall, Ordinary People, Silence of the Lambs, A Beautiful Mind, Million Dollar Baby, The Departed, and Slumdog Millionaire.

The 9 films that won BP and were nomination leaders without winning Direction: Cimarron, Mutiny on the Bounty, The Great Ziegfeld, The Life of Emlie Zola, Rebecca, Driving Miss Daisy, Shakespeare in Love, Gladiator, and Chicago.”

Chart after the cut.

If you look at these two groups, you’ll find that few exceptions, it also tends to sit better in retrospect when the director is also honored and when the writing is exceptional. If they love a movie enough, though, it simply gets their vote. And we’re left to sift through the debris and analyze how it all went down. It’s not supposed to be about “us,” but about “them.” They like what they like. It starts and ends there. The trick in not minding.

I’ve always sensed that any person gets a perverse delight in preferring a film over the one the critics like best, especially when there is this kind of consensus; The Social Network was winning an unprecedented amount of awards and everyone started to feel like they wanted to see it fall (you saw it play out in the comments section of this site, for instance). That is our nature, my friends – our nature as beautifully illustrated IN the film, The Social Network, ironically enough. I learned all I ever need to learn about human nature when I assistant taught a kindergarten class for a year. The only thing about us that changes over time is our appearance, our age and our vocabulary; all of those behaviors start early and remain in place throughout our lives.

And on that peppy note, the chart (built by Marshall):