And Then There Were Ten – in which our intrepid hero goes back and expands the Academy Award Best Picture nominations to ten nominations, and goes about filling those hypothetical slots. This time – it’s 2008
Chapter 1: The Box Office Hero the Academy Deserves, Not the One It Needs Right Now (The Dark Knight)
This candidate is my entire reason for coming up with this series. And many believe that this candidate missing out is the reason for the expansion. If you want to drive ratings for the broadcast ceremony, you want to select a movie that people have seen – and seen again – to the tune of over a billion in global box office. That would be nice. It also helps when a well-known movie is good.
As previously stated, a large part of the expansion was due to diminishing ratings. In the year 2000, when Gladiator (the #4 domestic box office draw of the year) took home the prize, the broadcast had 42.9 million viewers and a 26.2% share of Nielsen ratings. Right before our magic year of 2008, the magnificent No Country for Old Men took home the gold, but viewers had decreased by over 10 million and ABC had lost an 8% viewer share.
There is a correlation to the average domestic box as well – the average box office gross for Best Picture nominated films from Maximus in 2000 to Lord of the Rings: Return of the King’s year in 2003 was $131.7 million dollars – this average includes the weakest link, box-office-wise, The Pianist (2002) with $32 million dollars. Compare this period to the 2004 to 2007 range – the average gross is $64.6 million dollars, a 50% decrease – with the lowest being box office nomination belonging to Letters from Iwo Jima (2006) with $13 million dollars.
Let us talk 2008 box office – the collective nominees from this year fared better than the 2004 to 2007 returns with an average of $71.2 million, but still did not feature one movie from the top ten grossing movies for the year. That is not rare but slightly out of the ordinary – typically, using data from 2000 to 2015, roughly one movie (0.8 per year) from the highest box office winners are nominated for Best Picture. Throwing a bone to Joe Moviegoer, or the rare overlap of acclaim and commerce. If we look to post-expansion, approximately 1.15 movies in the top 10 per year are nominated for Best Picture. Although the number still seems low, that’s roughly a 43% increase in the likelihood of a top 10 movie making it. In 2009, the first year of the expansion, we had three Best Picture nominees that were in the box office Top 10 – Avatar, Up, and The Blind Side.
Talking box office winners has us dancing around our candidate. The #1 box office king for 2008 was The Dark Knight – taking home half a billion domestically and more than a billion internationally.
Nominations should not automatically go to the most seen movie. But, success also should not be a hurdle for a movie to get a nomination. Movie producers love to support a winner. The acting awards go to actors, the directing awards go to directors, writing awards to writers and so forth. So who gets the overall movie award? The producers. Best Picture is given to the producers who raise the movie’s budget and pray for success on the back end. An old rule of thumb was that a movie would not usually win without at least $100 million dollars of support from moviegoers. This tide seemed to turn in the 2000s however.
The Academy members do not fill out why they vote, so guesses have to be made to intentions behind the ballots – genre movies like The Dark Knight had previously been nominated earlier in the decade, as Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy was nominated for every outing from 2001 to 2003. That is notable for the success it achieved as high-fantasy sequels. But the old-fashioned epic scope and sweep of the series almost could not be denied in the end. Mixing critical acclaim, high production values and rapturous audience support leads to Middle Earth conquering all during this period.
The Academy seems to go in waves from standard conservative picks to going for outlier movies – giving in to high fantasy in 2003 may have lead to an emphasis on “cinema” over “movies” as the smaller studios and indies claimed the high nomination prizes during this time period. This can be thought of as “we rewarded you for popcorn movies, now we’re done and want to cry at a big weeping, important film.”
After Return of the King was championed, Fox, Paramount and other big studios’ boutique prestige departments starting scoring BP nominations nearly every year. It would be one thing for The Dark Knight to be a big hit but no nomination; it is another when you consider the support it received across industry guilds.
At the 2008 Oscars, The Dark Knight had eight nominations, in categories such as acting, editing, cinematography, art direction, sound, visual effects and makeup. Its haul of eight nominations has it only behind Benjamin Button (13, Best Picture nominee), Slumdog (10, BP nominee), and tied for third place with Milk (8, BP nominee).
There is a correlation for nomination leaders to be Best Picture nominees – if a film is leading the nomination count, then it has quantifiable evidence of widespread support across multiple departments. Since the expansion in 2009, every movie in the top three of most overall nominations has been nominated for Best Picture – that is 100%. The average number of nominations that a BP nominee has over this period is 6.40. There is a lot of variability to this statistic – there have been seven movies with three or less nominations up for Best Picture. The Dark Knight is in the top three in 2008 nominations, and is well beyond the “minimum” nominations and in the upper echelon of noms to get to the Best Picture field. And it is only one away from the only movie with more total nominations without a Best Picture nomination – They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969) with nine nominations. So the movie has support this year, but was it in the places that count?
More film department information can be gathered from the more influential guilds that make up the Academy – the Producers Guild (PGA), Directors Guild (DGA), Writers Guild (WGA), and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG).These acronym factories always announce nominations prior to Oscar and are pretty good signposts for nomination day.
Since 1989, the PGA has had a 72% correlation to BP nominees, which increases to 77% when the scope is narrowed to post-expansion – pretty good, and Dark Knight has a PGA bid.
DGA is even better – since 1970, the guild has an 83% correlation to BP success. Post expansion it has a 97% correlation, with the only DGA nominated film NOT nominated for Best Picture being David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo remake in 2011. And Dark Knight made this nomination too.
And WGA – the people who get very little respect in the movie industry – is there as well, but has only a 43% correlation for combined Original and Adapted Screenplays and looking at the post expansion era is rough; 33 movies since 2009 have been up for writing bids with the guild that haven’t been nominated for BP. Dark Knight has the WGA nomination as well, for what it’s worth.
Screen Actors Guild – here is where The Dark Knight hits a hurdle. This movie did not make it into the Screen Actors Guild award for Outstanding Cast Performance – it did win the SAG award for Supporting Actor (Heath Ledger, who won everything that year) and the SAG for Outstanding Stunt Ensemble Award, which segregates action movie acting. There have only been three BP nominated movies to be nominated for this SAG award (Inception in 2010, curiously Les Miserables in 2012, and Mad Max: Fury Road in 2015). The acting branch is important, but it’s prediction powers are a little lower than the DGA and PGA; from its inception in 1995 to 2015, a SAG nominee for Outstanding Cast correlates to a Best Picture nomination 68% of the time – this increases to 77% when looking post-expansion. So Dark Knight did not have it, but it could still have gotten in, as there have been 63 movies since 1995 that were nominated without a SAG Cast nomination.
Taking all four big guilds together, The Dark Knight received recognition for three out of four. Looking post-expansion, only three movies out of 38 with three or more big guild nominations didn’t make it – Bridesmaids (2011 – SAG, PGA, WGA), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011 – DGA, PGA, WGA) and Straight Outta Compton (2015 – SAG, PGA, WGA). That means that movies with three or more guild award nominations have a 92% chance of getting a Best Picture nomination during this time.
How about critical reviews? Near unanimous acclaim, with a 94% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The famous Editing nomination as a road to BP? Only about 54% correlation, but Dark Knight has that nomination as well.
Do they hate the man behind the movie? I don’t think so – Christopher Nolan movies have totaled three National Board of Review inclusions, three DGA nominees (Memento, The Dark Knight, Inception), two WGA nominations (The Dark Knight, Inception), two PGA nominations (The Dark Knight, Inception), and 26 total Oscar nominations. Best Director may have eluded Nolan but he does have recognition as a writer with Memento and Inception for Oscar nominations. Nolan was rewarded just two years later in Best Picture for Inception’s nomination, which boasts an even more bonkers plot expertly constructed into reality, but from an original idea – and one that did not start with Marvel or DC.
In the end, it is the subject material. There is no precedent for this to make it. In the history of comic books, comic strips, and graphic novels, the only one that has ever been nominated for Best Picture is Skippy, a 1931 movie based on a comic strip about a young boy doing something stupid and old-timey. Despite all the good tidings for normal nomination success, The Dark Knight’s subject is not serious enough – not significant enough – to warrant making that last level of recognition.
But magically 2008 has been expanded to ten slots.
The Dark Knight takes the first bonus slot.
ONGOING LIST
- Slumdog Millionaire
- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
- Frost/Nixon
- Milk
- The Reader
- The Dark Knight
Next in And Then There Were Ten for 2008, we look at actors acting for other acting actors.
The Actor’s Showcase bonus slot.
Statistics and Oscar history courtesy of: Boxofficemojo.com; Rottentomatoes.com; Imdb.com; Wikipedia.org
