After analysing nearly 20,000 films, researchers at the UCLAs California Centre for Population Research have listed several strongest predictors for Oscar nominations.
Washington, Jan 21 : After analysing nearly 20,000 films, researchers at the UCLA's California Centre for Population Research have listed several strongest predictors for Oscar nominations.
Using Internet Movie Database (IMDb) the team examined the records for every Oscar-eligible film made between the beginning of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in 1927 and 2005
They looked at number of Oscar-eligible films in any given year, the distributors and studios behind each performer's films, the film's tone or subject matter, the cast size, the sex of the performer, the performer's contacts within the industry, and past Oscar nominations among a film's cast, directors and writers.
The findings revealed that the first predictor of a nomination was a serious subject matter or a drama. The actors were nine times more likely to receive a nomination for their work in a drama than in a non-drama.
"In the entertainment industry, there's long been a sense that the nomination process prefers dramas, but I don't think anybody is aware of the magnitude of the effect," said Gabriel Rossman, one of the study's two authors and an assistant professor of sociology at UCLA.
The second predictor was the number of films screened in any given year.
"It's better to be nominated in a year when fewer films were screened, because there's less competition come awards time," she added.
And the third predictor was the female performer. They were twice as likely to get nominated as actors for any given performance,
"At least in this case, being underrepresented on the job works in women's favour," said Nicole Esparza, the study's lead author and a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at Harvard University..
"Because there are fewer female than male performers in films, and both are eligible for the same number of awards, actresses stand a better chance of being nominated than actors.
It's a simple matter of arithmetic, but as far as I know, nobody has ever raised the point."
The fourth is the history of high rankings in the movie-credit wherein higher a performer ranked in past movie credits the more likely he or she was to be nominated
Having a major distributor also increased the probability of an Oscar nomination. Major film distributor nearly doubled a performer's chances of being nominated.
Even past Oscar nomination also improved the odds of being nominated.
Performing alongside previously nominated cast members or those who worked over the years with a wide array of Academy members were no more likely to earn a nod than those with fewer industry ties.
ANI