Best Picture Chart Fun: Rankings, Nomination Formulas, Stats, Etc...
Saturday, January 16, 2016 at 6:29PM 
We love who what we love. And one of the things we love is Stats. And Charts! Oh god do we ever ♥ charts. Why don't you marry them then? Okay. I will. Call city hall. I'll throw a veil over my laptop for the big day.
The new charts are now walking down their virtual aisles to you. First up Best Picture. If you smoosh them all together you have a 131 minute violent R rated drama in which a captive mother tells her son the fantastical story of a grizzly fur trapper and a lovely Irish lass who attempt to survive on a harsh inhospitable planet called Mars where a raving band of warboys pursues them relentlessly... but we never hear how the story ends because suddenly a lawyer negtotiates the mom & son's release and a crack team of Boston journalists swoops in to investigate just what the hell happened and why no one knew about this story until now.
But that's just a synopsis.
Click to the chart to see how these movies got nominated, how would we rank or compare them and trivia. It was fun working the angles on this charts so please take a look and consider your own rankings in the comments.
Housekeeping Note: You'll notice the reader poll is no longer part of the Oscar charts. Since we lost our favorite poll site Twiigs... we have yet to find a suitable easy to access poll site that works well for embedding without interrupting the site in question or being ugly or forcing you to leave the site (you'll notice their fun absence on other former poll loving sites like Fug Girls - why is it so hard to find a good poll site?). But I'll keep an eye out and hope some new service emerges.
Reader Comments (24)
I want to watch that synopsis movie!
If we did one for Best Actor we wold have a brilliant writer and scientist abandoned by his friends (perhaps intentionally) in a harsh environment while in the middle of transitioning into a woman.
I just love these :)
Nathaniel, this is just a correction for the Best Director chart. You have Tom McCarthy as a 39 year-old, but he's really 49. ;-)
Sean -- thanks. I'm crowdsourcing the editing i suppose ;)
I did not need to know the suicide played a role on Room. It yet did not get released in Brazil
Marcello -- most of those "suicide" situations in those three pictures are not really what you think -- it's not really a spoiler about any of those pictures.
love this. so fun and fascinating. I'm a hardcore cinephile and awards junkie yet i still forget that only ONE?!? Ridley Scott film had been nominated for Best Picture before The Martian. Crazy (although surely T&L JUST missed).
Now Nathaniel, where or where or the Film Bitch nominees?!? i like you teasing the acting categories but where's the rest and amazing 'Extra' categories we so look forward to...
I love these stats. I always especially enjoy your "how they got nominated" section.
One correction, if I may: you say of The Revenant that "If it wins Best Picture, Inarittu will join John Ford and Joseph L Mackiewicz as the only Director with consecutive Best Pictures". But Ford and Mankiewicz each only directed one Best Picture winner. They won back-to-back directing Oscars, but The Grapes of Wrath and A Letter to Three Wives (for which they each won the first of the back-to-back) did not win Best Picture (as I know you know!...). Inarritu will therefore join them as the only Director with consecutive Best Director Oscars.
Looking forward to stats on the other categories! And I just love your synopsis of the Best pictures all together! (Tom, and yours for Best Actor - made me laugh!)
Well, Spotlight wouldn't be the first movie about journalists to win best picture. Don't forget It happened one night.
1. Room, 2. Mad Max: Fury Road, 3. Brooklyn, 4. Spotlight, 5. The Martian, 6. Bridge of Spies, 7. The Revenant, 8. The Big Short
EDWARD. god, that's what i meant. sorry. i'l fix it.
@ Edward- all the best actor nominees kind of blur together a little bit to me. The other categories are harder. But best actress would look like:
A young entrepreneurial immigrant lesbian mother deals with her unavailing marriage to her husband.
Nat, a small correction. Bridge of Spies is Spielberg's 10th Best Picture nominee, not 11th...
1. Jaws
2. Raiders of the Lost Ark
3. E.T.
4. The Color Purple
5. Schindler's List
6. Saving Private Ryan
7. Munich
8. War Horse
9. Lincoln
10. Bridge of Spies
He also got a Bst Director nomination for Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but that wasn't nominated for Best Picture...
Wow. Just shocking to me that box office figure for Brooklyn. What is wrong with American audiences? My favorite of the year behind carol.
Mikey67 - American audiences (sigh). They just refuse to go to things that aren't violent or don't have superheroes in them basically. But it's still a good number for a decently budgeted film with no bankable stories in which there is no violence whatsoever!
Death Count Chart:
Brooklyn: Ronan's sister
Bridge of Spies: Group that tried climbing over the wall but were shot down.
I made a homage video to celebrate the 7th nominations of Cate Blanchett and Kate Winslet. Please watch and enjoy!
Cate & Kate: A Tribute to 14 Oscar Nominations https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZU3bK-yjG4U
Mikey67- I wouldn't despair over "Brooklyn" box office figures -it's doing way, way better than "The Danish Girl", "Room", "Carol" and may even get up to "Spotlight" figures.
$23 million and counting for a drama with no big names is damn good.
Also count in the $15 million it has taken in for the UK release and it's made a profit.
$38 million before the Oscar boost / overseas BO is really good.
I think it will do really well overseas because of it's timeless theme, look at "Begin Again" which made $16 million domestic and then went on to make another $47 million overseas, so I wouldn't give up on "Brooklyn".
Richter Scale: But there is an 11th: Spielberg was one of the producers nominated for Best Picture nominee Letters from Iwo Jima. Granted, Spielberg didn't direct it - so it depends how the stat wants to settle.
Tom: That's good! Or how about, "A woman, trapped in a small room in an unfamiliar country, wonders how she will escape in time to rescue her business, celebrate her 45th wedding anniversary, and sleep with a cute shop girl all in the same week."
Daw, my spouse and I really liked Brooklyn a lot. Such a sweet, simple, touching story. Saorise Ronan was great in it, she could win the award next month and I would be perfectly happy. (Actually, any of 3 other nominees could win and I would be perfectly happy - just not JLaw this year.)
cal roth: It Happened One Night might have journalists as central characters, but it's not really ABOUT journalism. Gentleman's Agreement is, though, but...well...Gentleman's Agreement.
Is there a scene in The Martian where Chastain and Kate Mara are debate the technical merits of something or other vis-a-vis the spaceship? That would pass the Bechdel Test.
I assume the reason Spotlight was given a Bechdel pass is because there is a two-sentence exchange between McAdams and her nana over a newspaper, but the nana is never given a name; she's just referred to as "Sacha's nana" in the film. I understand the film is listed as a "debatable pass," but it makes me cringe that we're counting "Sacha's nana" as a named female character in the movie. When's the last movie defined its second most significant male character only as "grandpa" and practically no one even blinked an eyelash?
Nathaniel, under ROOM's trivia, you list SEABISCUIT as William H Macy's Best Picture nominee, but he was in another (and infintely better) Best Picture nominee: FARGO. Just figured that if you wanted to list just one of his BP movies, it might as well be Fargo.
Is it working like that only.
this is how it is working now.