The 91st annual Academy Awards ceremony will get underway at 8pm this Sunday, February 24th.
For many, part of the fun of the year's most prestigious movie awards is trying to guess which films and actors will take home the night's top prizes. If you're making your own predictions, we have some data to help transform your hunches into educated guesses.
Dramas are the most likely to win Best Picture; in fact, it's not even close. Thirty-nine dramas have won Best Picture. The next highest category are biopics like Schindler's List, which won in 1995, and Gandhi from 1982, but even that category has only scored 17 wins. Action and adventure movies like Black Panther have only won the top award 10 times.
If a movie wins a Golden Globe, is it more likely to win Best Picture that year? Unfortunately, you can't look there for rock-solid Oscar predictions. While judges for the two awards used to track more closely in decades past, since 2000, only eight pictures that won a Golden Globe for Best Picture in the Drama category have won a Best Picture Oscar, making it less accurate than a coin toss. If the trend holds, Bohemian Rhapsody, which won the Golden Globe this year, is less likely to take home an Oscar.
Last year's Oscars ceremony featured many women in the film industry speaking out about the #MeToo movement in the wake of revelations about sexual misconduct by Harvey Weinstein. The movie business hasn't always been a welcoming one for women of any age. If you take the top ten youngest winners of Best Actor and Best Actress, the tenth youngest man to ever win, Adrien Brody at age 29 is still older than the tenth youngest woman ever to win, Vivien Leigh, who won Best Actress for her role in Gone With The Wind when she was 29.
Of course, numbers aren't everything, especially when it comes to box-office revenue for Oscar winners. Below you'll see a chart showing the top-grossing films for each year back to the 1920's. The blue dots clustered in the corner? Those are Oscar winners for the past ten years. By the way -- the Oscars data we're presenting here is interactive. Run your cursor over the charts to get some fascinating insights.
Unlike almost-host Kevin Hart, who stepped down after criticism of homophobic statements he made on Twitter, awards for cinematography, makeup and hairstyling, film editing, and live action shorts were briefly banished from the broadcast only to be restored back.
In the last ten years, only Slumdog Millionaire has won Best Picture, Best Cinematography and Best Film Editing. If any movie wins more than one, it will be the first time since 2014, when Birdman won both Best Picture and Best Cinematography. Emmanuel Lubezki won the award for Best Cinematography that year, and he won it three times in a row between 2013 (Gravity) and 2016 (Revenant).
Whoever wins, we'll be here with the results.
