Periodically, we’re going to be looking at the Oscars in a different way. While most of our content deals with predictions and precursors and reviews and previews and everything in between, the facts and statistics surrounding the Oscars are seldom referenced but in passing. These articles will change that. As often as is possible (research takes time), we’ll take a narrow look at statistics about and surrounding the Oscars.

For any Oscar lover who is fond of statistics, it’s always interesting to look at the actual numbers surrounding the Oscars. When talking about numbers, one of the best statistics to review is which categories tend to favor Best Picture nominees and Best Picture winners most. It’s also quite fascinating to see how nomination tallies, MPAA ratings, box office numbers, and length can affect the final outcome. While my past statistics articles haven’t done a lot of looking at the current Oscar race, this one will.

This article primarily looks at what films won the Oscars and how they performed in these various metrics. While another piece could easily be written on how nominees have followed these statistics as well, that’s a much broader and more in depth focus than I wanted to dig into with this article.

To start things off, let’s look at category placements and where the vast majority of Best Picture winners find their nominations.

There are four categories where Best Picture winners thrive from a nominations perspective. Matter of fact, these are the four categories where a failure to secure a nomination can often be a death knell for a film’s Best Picture chances.

The all-time best predicting category is Directing. In the 90-year history of the Academy awards, only four films have won Best Picture without a directing citation. The first was Wings at the first Academy Awards, which earned a handful of nominations, but directing wasn’t one of them. The second was four years later when Grand Hotel also earned the distinction of being the only film in Oscar history to win Best Picture as its only nomination. Fast-forward 57 years to 1989 when Driving Miss Daisy helmer Bruce Beresford missed the Directing slate, but went on to win against all odds. And finally, the most recent incident, six years ago when Ben Affleck failed to secure a nomination for Argo and then captured the brass ring.

This is the single most obvious statistic to use when picking winners. If the same plays out this year, only BlacKkKlansman, The Favourite, Roma, and Vice can possibly win Best Picture.

Here are some relevant and compelling statistics regarding Directing nominees who’ve won Best Picture.

Longest Streak – 1932/33-1988 (56 Years)
Second Longest Streak – 1990-2011 (22 Years)
Current Streak – 2013-Present (5 Years)
Overall Effectiveness – 95.56%
Last 5 Years – 100%
Last 10 Years – 90%
Last 15 Years – 93.3%
Last 20 Years – 95%
Last 25 Years – 96%
Last 30 Years – 93.3%

While matching winners is a bit less common, Directing is still the best category for that with only 25 films not winning Directing as well. The staggering statistic is that in the last 30 years, that trend has dramatically increased with the majority of that growth being in the last 10 years. In the last 30 years, 9 films have failed to win both prizes while in the last 10, that number is five.

Longest Streak – 1957-1966 (10 Years)
Second Longest Streak – 1973-1980 & 1990-1997 (8 Years)
Current Streak – 2017-Present (1 Year)
Overall Effectiveness – 72.2%
Last 5 Years – 40%
Last 10 Years – 60%
Last 15 Years – 66.7%
Last 20 Years – 60%
Last 25 Years – 68%
Last 30 Years – 70%

The most common category placements following Directing are the writing categories. While Adapted Screenplay has the better track record, overall, a Best Picture winner without a writing nomination has occurred only 7 times since the first Academy Awards. The first two years of the Academy awards saw the first two instances of this. The third and fourth followed quickly with the fifth and sixth Oscars.

After that, the fifth instance occurred in 1948 when Hamlet failed to pick up a writing nomination. Several years later, The Sound of Music became the sixth. The last time it happened was in 1997 when Titanic fell short of the all-time nominations record by failing to pick up a screenplay nomination, but went on to win Best Picture along with a record-tying ten other awards.

This category has had the longest current streak on Best Picture winners, which gives a leg up to BlacKkKlansman and A Star Is Born in adapted screenplay and The Favourite, Green Book, Roma, and Vice in original.

Here are some interesting statistics regarding the writing categories and Best Picture winners earning nominations.

Longest Streak – 1966-1996 (31 Years)
Second Longest Streak – 1998-Present (20 Years)
Current Streak – 1998-Present (20 Years)
100%; 100%; 100%; 100%; 96%; 96.67%; 92.22%
Overall Effectiveness – 92.22%
Last 5 Years – 100%
Last 10 Years – 100%
Last 15 Years – 100%
Last 20 Years – 100%
Last 25 Years – 96%
Last 30 Years – 96.67%

On the screenwriting winner side, 28 films have won Best Picture without a screenwriting win. Unlike directing, this has become more prominent in the last 30 years than the previous. All but six won in the last thirty years while impressively only 2 films have failed in the last ten.

Longest Streak – 1952-1960 & 1987-1995 (9 Years)
Current Streak – None in 2017
Overall Effectiveness – 68.89%
Last 5 Years – 80%
Last 10 Years – 80%
Last 15 Years – 80%
Last 20 Years – 80%
Last 25 Years – 76%
Last 30 Years – 80%

Not far behind writing in terms of correlation is Best Film Editing, which has managed to fail only ten times since the category was instituted in 1934. That’s rather impressive. While the current streak is also the shortest among the four major categories with Birdman proving editing wasn’t a requirement, it’s accuracy record is pretty impressive.

Before Birdman, the films to fail to secure an editing nomination were It Happened One Night in 1934, The Life of Emile Zola in 1937, Hamlet in 1948, Marty in 1955, Tom Jones in 1963, A Man for All Seasons in 1966, The Godfather, Part II in 1974, Annie Hall in 1977, and Ordinary People in 1980

The most famous incident of Film Editing being a better predictor of Best Picture than just about any other category was the year Brokeback Mountain notoriously lost to Crash with the latter getting a Film Editing nomination and the former not.

This could suggest that only BlacKkKlansman, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Favourite, Green Book, and Vice could possibly win Best Picture.

Here are some statistics for Film Editing.

Longest Streak – 1981-2013 (33 Years)
Second Longest Streak – 1938-1947 (10 Years)
Current Streak – 2015-Present (3 Years)
Overall Effectiveness – 88.10%
Last 5 Years – 80%
Last 10 Years – 90%
Last 15 Years – 93.3%
Last 20 Years – 95%
Last 25 Years – 96%
Last 30 Years – 96.7%

While it is one of the most accurate categories with regard to picking Best Picture, the winners of the Film Editing prize seldom also win Best Picture. In the 84 years the category has existed only 34 films have won Best Film Editing and Best Picture. None of the last five Best Picture winners won that category.

Longest Streak – 1956-1962 (7 Years)
Second Longest Streak – 1992-1994 (3 Years)
Current Streak – None since 2013
Overall Effectiveness – 40.48%
Last 5 Years – 0%
Last 10 Years – 30%
Last 15 Years – 40%
Last 20 Years – 35%
Last 25 Years – 44%
Last 30 Years – 43.3%

The final of the big four categories, or more specifically sets of categories, that have an impact on the Best Picture winner is acting. The four acting categories have aligned with Best Picture in all but eleven years since the first Academy Awards. Those instances were 1927/28 with Wings, 1929/30 with All Quiet on the Western Front, 1931/32’s Grand Hotel, 1951 and 1952 back-to-back for Best Picture winners An American in Paris and The Greatest Show on Earth, in 1956 with Around the World in 80 Days, with 1958’s Gigi, 1987’s The Last Emperor, in 1995 for Braveheart, 2003’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and, most recently, 2008 with Slumdog Millionaire. While the most recent two titles had some chatter about potential acting nominees, what most of these films had was large ensembles where singling out an individual performer was a challenge.

Having now the second longest current streak at only 9 years, there’s some signs that these old markers are a bit outdated. Though, you cannot argue with results as all of them are well over 87% matching in all of history.

What does this say about the current batch of nominees? Seven of this year’s Best Picture nominees really hope that this gives them a leg up while the eighth, Black Panther, hopes for a break in the tradition.

Here are some statistics regarding acting nominations and how they align with Best Picture.

Longest Streak – 1959-1986 (28 Years)
Second Longest Streak – 1933-1950 (18 Years)
Current Streak – 2009-Present (9 Years)
Overall Effectiveness – 87.8%
Last 5 Years – 100%
Last 10 Years – 90%
Last 15 Years – 87%
Last 20 Years – 90%
Last 25 Years – 88%
Last 30 Years – 90%

On the winners side, acting is barely third in the overall list of winners best predicting of Best Picture winners. In history, a massive 40 years have seen none of the four acting winners (two in the early days of the Oscars) coming from the Best Picture winner. In the last 30 years, that number is 13 with 6 in the last 10. While that’s not nearly as bad a record as editing, it’s a staggeringly high number from a modern standpoint.

Longest Streak – 1944-1950 (7 Years)
Second Longest Streak – 1998-2002 (5 Years)
Current Streak – None in 2017
Overall Effectiveness – 55.6%
Last 5 Years – 40%
Last 10 Years – 40%
Last 15 Years – 40%
Last 20 Years – 55%
Last 25 Years – 52%
Last 30 Years – 57%

While we’ve looked at the writing and acting categories solely from a broad overarching perspective, it’s interesting to look at both categories and find which categories are better aligned with Best Picture than the others.

In writing, we can only really look at the post-1939 landscape in original and post-1955 for adapted as the writing categories in those early days weren’t easily aligned with the current dichotomy of honored screenplays. However, looking at those subsequent years, Best Picture winners have been nominated for Adapted Screenplay 38 times out of 62 (61.29%) whereas original has pulled has seen 22 of 78 (28.21%) Best Picture nominees there. That’s a pretty large discrepancy. In terms of winners, the difference is about the same with 32 of 62 (51.61% Best Picture winners also winning Adapted Screenplay while 16 of 78 won Original Screenplay. To put that in perspective. 32 of the 38 adapted nominees winning compared to 16 of 22. Six of each failed to win.

These metrics probably help BlacKkKlansman and A Star Is Born more than they help The Favourite, Green Book, Roma, and Vice.

On the acting side, we look at nominations first. Lead Actor and Supporting Actor are the tops with 57 of 90 (63.3%) Best Picture winners securing nominations in lead and 51 of 82 (62.2%) in support. On the actress side, it’s 27 of 90 (30%) and 33 of 82 (40.2%) in lead and support respectively. This reflects on another issue regarding women-centric movies fairing more poorly with Oscar voters than male-centric films.

In terms of winners, there’s a bit more parity with 27 of 90 (30%) of lead actors, 11 of 90 (12.22%) lead actresses, 16 of 82 (19.5%) supporting actors, and 10 of 82 (12.2%) supporting actresses. While acting is one of the key categories needed for Oscar glory, no specific category can lay claim to being more important than another in terms of wins.

As for nominations, lead actor and supporting actor are clearly very important stepping stones for Oscar glory while supporting actress is not and lead actress is incredibly poor. That gives Vice, A Star Is Born, Green Book, and Bohemian Rhapsody a boost for their lead actor nominations, as well as Green Book, BlacKkKlansman, A Star Is Born, and Vice in supporting actor. In lead actress, Roma, The Favourite, and A Star Is Born have nominations with Vice, Roma, and The Favourite in supporting actress.

Before 1936, there were only two acting categories. During that period, only two Best Picture winners, Cimarron and It Happened One Night, picked up both nominations and only the latter managed to win both. After that point, with four categories to nominate, there were very few, as in two, Best Picture winners that secured nominations in all four categories. Those films were Mrs. Miniver (1942) and From Here to Eternity (1953). It’s now been more than 65 years since that last happened. Suffice it to say that neither of those films managed to win all of them with Miniver picking up one and Eternity taking two.

Several more films have managed acting nominations in three different categories. It’s happened 24 times with nine of those in the last 30 years and four in the last ten (The King’s Speech in 2010, 12 Years a Slave in 2013, Birdman in 2014, and The Shape of Water last year). This year saw two films manage that feat: Vice and A Star Is Born.

The exact same number of films (24), since 1936, have gotten one or fewer acting nomination, 11 of those were films with no nominations. That means, you’re more likely to win Best Picture if you have acting nominations in two or more categories. Cue a boon for Vice, A Star Is Born, The Favourite, Roma, and Green Book.

A caveat to that, for The Favourite and Roma, only eleven films in history have secured nominations in multiple acting categories with two of them being the lead and supporting actress categories. Of the times when the Best Picture winner’s only two nominations came in lead and supporting actress, that number drops to four.

In terms of winners, no Best Picture winner in history has ever won in more than two acting categories. Of those winning in two categories, there are only 12 such films. Of those twelve films, only three won both lead categories (It Happened One Night in 1934, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1975, and The Silence of the Lambs in 1991). On the other end, only two films won both supporting categories (From Here to Eternity in 1953 and West Side Story in 1961).

Of the remaining seven, three won for Best Actress, four for Best Actor. The three Best Actress winners were twice paired with Best Supporting Actor winners (Terms of Endearment in 1983 and Million Dollar Baby in 2004). The other Best Actress winner was matched with Best Supporting Actress in 1998 (Shakespeare in Love). On the male lead side, 1979 was the only time Best Actor was paired with Best Supporting Actress with Kramer vs. Kramer. The remaining three were both male categories in 1944 (Going May Way), 1946 (The Best Years of Our Lives), and in 1959 (Ben-Hur).

That means a full 9 of the twelve featured a female acting winner while 10 of them included a male winner. Thus, only one film featured two women winning while three saw two men winning.

Before we look at other statistics, it might be interesting to examine which other categories have a minor impact on Best Picture winners. While there are no other categories where more than 50% of the winners matched the Best Picture winner, there are four additional categories with strong correlation in terms of nominations.

Best Cinematography is the best with a 57 out of 90 (63.3%) success rate with an almost identical, but slightly higher correlation rate in the last 30 years (66.67%). Next is Original Score with 51 out of 84 matching for a 60.7% overall percentage with a boost in the last 30 years to 63.3%. Third is Sound Mixing with a 53.4% (47 out of 88) rate overall and a much improved 63.3% in the last 30 years. Finally, we have Production Design with a slightly above half 51.1% (46 out of 90) in the overall with a slightly better 53.3% rate in the last 30 years.

We’ve looked at the best, but what are the worst?

In terms of nominations, Foreign Language Film is obviously the worst since no non-silent, non-English-language film has ever won Best Picture. Just above that is Original Song with an abysmal 8.3% overall rating with only 7 of 84 songs coming from Best Picture winners. That percentage doubles in the last 30 years with 16.7% of the Best Picture winners being nominated. Next highest on the list is Best Visual Effects with an 11.4% overall rate (9 of 79) with 13.3% in the last 30 years. Fourth is Sound Editing at 18.2% (10 of 55). That improves greatly to 30% in the last 30 years. A special mention goes to Makeup & Hairstyling. It only has 37 years worth of winners, but only 10 (27.03%) have synced up.

Those where the category winner matches Best Picture find five categories where the result is just above or quite below 10%. Foreign Language Film leads this list, but Original Song is again the most significant failure. Only 4.76% (4 of 84) of Original Song winners came from Best Picture winners. 3 of those 4 came in the last 30 years, which gives it only a 10% match rate in that period. Sound Effects comes in third on this list with 5.45% overall (3 of 55). Those three all came in the last 30 years (a 10% match rate). Visual Effects is on this list as well with 6.33% of historical winners matching (5 of 79). In the last 30 years, that percentage has climbed to 13.3% in the last 30 years, otherwise 4 of the 5 matches came in this period.

The final category on this list is Makeup & Hairstyling. At 37 winners, 4 is all it could muster to match Best Picture (10.81%). Three of those were in the last 30 years (not difficult considering how few winners the category has generated). That’s a smaller 10% rating for that period, the only one of these categories to go down in the last 30 years instead of up.

So, how often is it a requirement for each of these categories to align? Nomination wise, it’s fairly important. For category winners, it isn’t. Before digging into the details, the only film that has nominations in none of the four major categories, Black Panther, would be breaking 90 years of historical precedent to win, so you can probably ignore the film entirely.

We start our look at two categories, Directing and acting. As these are the most familiar to Oscar watchers, they make more sense to focus on even if acting is the lowest of the prime categories. We’ll look at separate statistics adding in writing and Film Editing in a little bit.

In the 90 years that both of these categories were presented, 77 of those years saw Best Picture requiring a nomination in both categories. That’s an 85.56% requirement rate. In the last ten years, it’s only failed twice (Slumdog Millionaire didn’t have acting and Argo didn’t have directing). Five years in a row, however, both categories were required. Going back to 20 years, we add one more film, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King without an acting nomination. Then in thirty, Driving Miss Daisy and Braveheart are added to the list with no directing citation for the former and no acting citation for the latter.

While over time, acting has been the category to miss most often, the two are closer in parity in the last thirty years. This gives BlacKkKlansman, The Favourite, Roma, and Vice an edge.

One more bit of information. We talk of 13 films alone winning Best Picture without both an acting and a directing nomination. Of those 13, only 2 managed to win Best Picture without either of those categories, both of which were in the early days with Wings at the first Academy Awards and Grand Hotel from the fifth ceremony, and that’s the one we referenced winning with no other nominations.

In terms of wins, the numbers drop significantly with only 38 films winning both an acting award and directing with 13 of those winning neither.

Now, let’s toss the next most visible category into the mix: writing.

In this situation, across 90 years, the number of Best Picture winners requiring all three sets of categories drops by 5 to 72. That means that of the 77 films that won with directing and acting nominations, only 5 of those won without a writing nomination. That’s pretty significant. It suggests that having all three nominations, while not as important, is still quite important 80% of the time. In the last 30 years, of the five films that did not have either acting or directing citations, all of those films did have a writing nomination. Then there’s one additional time where a film had both acting and directing and no writing nomination, Titanic in 1997.

This provides more evidence to suggest that at least writing and directing nominations are required for Best Picture wins, with only 3 of the last 30 films to win having picked up either, but not both. And in two of those cases, it was the directing nomination that was missed and not the writing one.

Looking at the current slate of nominees, BlacKkKlansman, The Favourite, Roma, and Vice have all three nominations. Of the remaining four Best Picture nominees, Green Book and A Star Is Born are the only two who have a writing nomination, but are missing directing, not fatal, but a challenge.

In terms of winners, eight fewer films won Best Picture without a writing nomination, making that 30 of 90 films to win with only two of the three categories as winners.

As with the prior section, let’s look at some more information. With a full 18 films not getting nominations in all three category sets, the two we mentioned previously (Wings and Grand Hotel) are again the only two films to get nominations in none of the three categories. The remaining 16 were nominated in two of the three, meaning that, in no situation in the 90-year history of the Academy Awards has a film won Best Picture without nominations in two of the three categories. So, if you’ve gotten only one of the three, then you’re probably out of the running. The only film this entirely rules out is Bohemian Rhapsody, which only has an acting nomination and has none in directing or writing.

Finally, let’s throw Film Editing into the mix. This category didn’t exist for the first six Academy Awards, so when we look at how many films have won Best Picture with nominations in all four sets of categories, the number is 62, taking out the six years that there was no category, that’s a scant four fewer films that won without an editing nomination, i.e. 78% of the time.

From the lens of the last thirty years, there were a total of seven films that won Best Picture without all four of the category nominations. That’s just one more instance than without directing, acting, or writing. That case came in 2014 with Birdman, the only film in the last thirty years that did not get a Film Editing nomination. That’s 77% of the last 30 Best Picture winners that required all four nominations to win.

If we examine only thirty years of history, each category has been missed by at least one Best Picture winner. Acting and Directing have each missed twice while Film Editing and Writing haven’t missed but one each. Granted, Editing was the most recently missed of any Best Picture winner, in 2014, but two years earlier Directing got missed as well. Throw in an acting miss in 2008 and you have three films in the last ten years to miss one of the four categories. In the last twenty, that increases to five. A final increase to 7 total in the last 30 years gives us our 23 of 30 rate for the last 30 years.

So, what can we take this to mean? There are only three films that have picked up nominations in all four categories: BlacKkKlansman, The Favourite, and Vice. Green Book, Roma, and A Star Is Born are added to the mix with three of the four. These are the six films that have the best chance at an Oscar win for Best Picture. Yet, history favors the former three as opposed to the latter two.

On the victory side, only 11 films in history (since the inception of Film Editing that is) have won all four of these categories. Gone With the Wind was the first in 1939. It was followed by The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946, From Here to Eternity in 1953, On the Waterfront in 1954, The Bridge on the River Kwai in 1957, Ben-Hur in 1959, Patton in 1970, The French Connection in 1971, Gandhi in 1982, Unforgiven in 1992, and Forrest Gump in 1994. It’s now been 24 years since it last happened, so don’t expect it.

If we take out the first six Academy Awards, with all four sets of categories in existence for eighty-four years, we have only one instance where two of the four categories didn’t have a Best Picture winner in them (Hamlet in 1948). Beyond that, of the remaining 83 years, 21 times did Best Picture not get nominated in all four categories. This means that 74.7% of the time, Best Picture winners had to be nominated in all four categories to win.

A lot has changed in the last decade, but historical precedents haven’t been utterly cast aside during that time either.

At one point in time, during the 1980s, it was incredibly common for the year’s most nominated film to also win Best Picture. In 90 years, 57 Best Picture winners were either the most nominated or tied for the most nominated. That’s a 63.3% rate, which suggests the designation isn’t a necessity. This has become even less pronounced in the last 25 years. The average has continued to drop each five-year period with 25 years being an average of 60%, 20 years being an average of 50%, and the last 15 years have been a staggering 40%. That means, 4 of every 10 Best Picture winners are the most nominated. The Shape of Water was the most recent with Birdman, The Hurt Locker, and The King’s Speech the titles in the last decade.

That might hinder The Favourite‘s chances a bit as it leads the competition with ten nominations. Thankfully for Roma, it ties Favourite‘s ten nominations, which positions it well for a win, though neither is guaranteed by these metrics.

On the winners’ side, the metrics get a bit better as 80% of the Best Picture winners in history were also the most awarded film of the year. That number peaked in the 1980s and has been steadily decreasing as well. While the last 20 years saw a 75% streak, the last ten has dropped to 60% with the last five years being notably below that at 40%. Once again, Birdman and The Shape of Water are the two films.

The problem with this particular metric is that we won’t know if it mattered until the end. That said, you can look at the films that are being predicted to win the most awards and possibly extrapolate which have a good chance of winning. That gives Roma and The Favourite a solid advantage in the competition.

What’s interesting about these numbers is the percentage of categories a Best Picture winner claims when it does win. Historically, a Best Picture winner wins 57.81% of its awards. That number has been pretty consistent until the last ten years where it’s dropped to 46.47%. That number gets worse looking at the last three years where the two and three wins apiece that Spotlight and Moonlight earned respectively help bring down the average, but the dismal four victories of Birdman (out of nine nominations) and the four of The Shape of Water (out of thirteen) do more to depress the numbers than the others.

What that means is that it’s no longer a necessity for a film to win most or all of its awards to win Best Picture. Only six films have ever won all of their nominations (Wings won its two in 1927/28, Grand Hotel won its one in 1931/32, It Happened One Night won all five of its categories in 1934, Gigi took all 9 in 1958, The Last Emperor won all nine as well in 1987, and most recently The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King holds the record of biggest 100% victory with an eleven-for-eleven streak in 2003) with an added four titles that won more than 85% (The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946 won seven of eight, The Bridge on the River Kwai did the same in 1957, Ben-Hur managed eleven of twelve in 1959, and West Side Story went 10 for 11 in 1961). Several films have won over 60%, but none have done so since 2009 when The Hurt Locker won on six of its nine nominations.

While performance with Oscar nominations is a key component of a film’s potential, there are some other factors that might influence whether a film wins or not. We start out this section by looking at a film’s MPAA rating. Before the creation of the Motion Picture Association of America, the studios had been held to the Hays Production Code, which was a stringent set of rules that all films had to adhere to in order to secure release. While the Production Code was incredibly restrictive, few films released without its influence. The Production Code had come about due to the increasingly risque and violent output of the 1920s. However, as the Code began to lose its footing with more and more content being released without a rating, the MPAA was formed in order to give families a way of deciding which films they could take their whole family to see and which they could not.

Thus, in 1968, the MPAA came up with its initial list of ratings, consisting of four: G for General audiences, M for Mature audiences, R for Restricted audiences (age 16-plus), and X for solely-adult audiences. The code took several tweaks over the years with GP replacing M in 1970, R’s audience limitation increasing to age 17 also in 1970, PG replacing GP in 1971, PG-13 being added in 1984, and, most recently, the creation of the NC-17 rating in 1990 to replace the X rating, which, due to copyright reasons, had been abused by the porn industry for a number of years (such as awarding films XX and XXX ratings among other things).

The five-rating system (G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17) has now been in force for 28 years and fewer and fewer films are earning the two lowest ratings. Disney Animation, which used to put out the most G-rated content, has found its ratings shift to PG and PG-13 over the years, diminishing the potential for audiences to care about those lower ratings. NC-17 is still an advertising nightmare and causes some films to do what the films of the Production Code era once did and release without a rating since the strictures of the NC-17 are too onerous applying almost exclusively to sex and not violence. That, in itself, is one of the biggest frustrations with the rating system: its seeming arbitrariness with regard to sex, language, and violence.

History aside, there was a time when the Academy chose PG or PG-13 rated films over R rated films in great numbers. However, as the Academy has matured, so too have their selections. 31.1% of all films ever released have the R rating. That’s twenty-eight total pictures. 21 of those were within the last 30 years, representing 70% of the total winners from 1988 through 2017. The last PG-13 film to win Best Picture was The Artist in 2011. Before that, it was Million Dollar Baby in 2004. The last PG-rated film to win was Driving Miss Daisy in 1989, the cusp of our 30-year cut-off.

As a historical record, only one film has won by being released with a G rating, Oliver! in 1968. Ironically, the next year’s winner, Midnight Cowboy, was the first and only X-rated film ever to win Best Picture.

As to recent trends. As the statistics above show, the percentage of R-rated films to win Best Picture has increased over the years from 70% in the last 30 years to 90% in the last 10 and 100% in the last five years.

So, how does this impact this year’s nominees. Three title are rated PG-13. The other five are rated R. This gives BlacKkKlansman, The Favourite, Roma, A Star Is Born, and Vice the best odds at winning Best Picture.

In terms of source material, there’s a clear trend towards honoring original works than there is adaptions. While historically, adapted stories have the edge 59 to 31 (or 65.6%). Within the last thirty years, parity has been established and the balance has shifted.

In the last 30 years, 14 have been original and 16 were adapted. In the last 20 years, that number shifted to 10 and 10. In the last ten, it was 6 and 4 favoring originals. Whether or not this is a long term trend remains to be seen, but considering the state of the film industry and the number of sub par adaptations and remakes being made, it suggests the push towards original content at the Oscars will only increase.

For this year, once again the split is three and five, adaptations and originals, with Bohemian Rhapsody, The Favourite, Green Book, Roma, and Vice being favored.

Once upon a time, Best Picture winners were box office draws both before and after release. Today, the more money a film makes the less likely it is to win Best Picture. Perhaps it’s the diversifying of tastes of Oscar voters or perhaps general audiences aren’t as interested in heady subjects as they are escapist entertainment, two categories that seldom intersect.

Box office tallies aren’t readily available prior to 1974 and even after that, it’s hard to truly assess how potent box office was more than 30 years ago. Based on 59 films that we have some measure of box office record for, the all-time average currently sits at $104 million for a film’s overall run at the box office. This number is not adjusted for inflation. In the last thirty years, the average was around $132 million. That slightly increased in the last 25 years (thanks in large part to Titanic‘s massive box office numbers). That number drops to $110 million in the last twenty years, and $71 million in the last ten. In the last five years, the average was $47 million, which is more than 50% below the average.

When you look at inflation-adjusted numbers, the effect is even more pronounced. Ticket prices averaged $1.87 in 1974 and are averaging $8.97 today. As such, you can tell that older releases, when compared to modern ones, are going to have much bigger tallies, which will make this downward trend in box office even more pronounced. Even 30 years ago the average price ($4.11) was less than half of what it is today. Further, while adjusting for inflation, the trend of re-releases has diminished greatly in the last few decades, but that creates a bit of discrepancy in these numbers as re-releases and split-year releases can sometimes goose numbers one way or the other, so take these numbers with a grain of salt.

Adjusting for inflation, there are only 44 films we feel confident in comparing. The all-time average is $244 million. In the last 30 years, the average drops slightly to $238 million. At twenty years, the drop is dramatic to an average of $159 million. At ten years, it’s down to $82 million. Those are some sizable drops. The last film to make more than $100 million at the box office was Argo in 2012, which made $136 million. With five films under that bar in the last five years, there are only 16 others in the last 44 years, bringing the total to 21 of 44. When looking at only the last 30, the number of sub-$100 million performers is twelve. That means in the last thirty years, there have been a large number of box office hits, but with 42% of the under-$100-million being in the last five years, that’s a worrisome trend, especially for the Academy.

They made some strides this year by nominating Black Panther, which if it won, would be the highest non-inflated gross of any film in Oscar history. It would also destroy our glimpse at averages. Considering that, the downward trend favors the four films that made less than $100 million at this year’s box office, BlacKkKlansman, The Favourite, Green Book, and Vice. Roma doesn’t fit neatly in this equation since it was released to Netflix and didn’t really get much of a theatrical run. Its victory would also throw things into a tizzy since there would be no precedent.

Although it really has no impact on the Oscars, a film’s status as black-and-white or color is an interesting statistic nonetheless. 68.9% of films winning Best Picture in history have been in color. 93.3% of the films in the last thirty years have been. Strangely, that means two of thirty were in black-and-white. That’s significant because of how often black-and-white films are even made, better yet nominated for Best Picture.

1955 was the last year of back-to-back black-and-white Best Picture winners. From 1939 through 1955, there were only three color Best Picture winners: Gone With the Wind in 1939, An American in Paris in 1951, and The Greatest Show on Earth in 1952 (the first instance of back-to-back color winners). From that point on, black-and-white became the inconsistent honoree rather than color. The last black-and-white film of the black-and-white era to win Best Picture was 1960’s The Apartment. To that point, only seven color films had won Best Picture out of 33 winners.

As black-and-white films went out of vogue in those years, fewer and fewer were made and these days, a film being made in black-and-white is a conscious choice of the director for artistic reasons rather than being a trend. Since 1960, two black-and-white films have managed to win Best Picture: Schindler’s List in 1993 and The Artist in 2011. Those are the only two films in the last thirty years to win. That is a boon to all but one of the Best Picture nominees as Roma is the sole black-and-white entry.

Having said that, looking at the post-black-and-white period, it is interesting just how often Best Picture nominees were filmed that way. Ostensibly, 1966 is the last year black-and-white films were major Hollywood players. 1966 was the last year that the cinematography, art direction, and costume design categories were split between color and black-and-white. It was also the last consecutive year in which a Best Picture nominee was filmed in black-and-white. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was that film, having followed 1965’s A Thousand Clowns. After that point, only six films have been nominated for Best Picture that were black-and-white.

1971 was the first instance when The Last Picture Show was released. This was followed not far after by The Elephant Man. It would be 13 years before another film would follow in those footsteps when Schindler’s List did it. It is one of only four black-and-white Best Picture nominees in the last 30 years. The next was The Artist in 2011. Since then, there have been only two films, Nebraska in 2013 and Roma in 2018. Two-thirds of the films in the last thirty years have won, which is the only factor that could boost Roma‘s chances.

Now we come to our final set of statistics for this article: runtime.

There once was a time when a film over three hours had no problem winning Best Picture. While only eleven films have ever done so, only four of those have been in the last 30 years with only one in the last 20 years. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was that film and it won 15 years ago in 2003. Before that, the three winners were Titanic in 1997, Schindler’s List in 1993, and Dances with Wolves in 1990, the second-longest film in history to win Best Picture, running two minutes short of Gone With the Wind‘s 238-minute time (that’s two minutes shy of four hours).

More commonly, films running between two and three hours are the best bets for Oscar winners. Just over half of the 90 Best Picture winners (50 films) have fallen in that window. That average increased between twenty and thirty years ago, but over the last thirty has remained relatively consistent at 60%. Under two hours, there have historically been 29 films to win Best Picture with anywhere between 40% and 27% of those in the last thirty years.

Does that mean anything this year? Not likely. There are no films over three hours and only one, The Favourite, under two hours (by only one minute, though). What’s strange is that of the remaining seven Best Picture nominees, all of them fall within six minutes of each other: between two hours and ten minutes and two hours and sixteen. A Star Is Born is on the upper end of that while Green Book is on the lower end. Five of those seven are at or one minute on either side of two hours and fifteen minutes, which is a fascinating data set.

Runtime is an interesting statistic, but not really a meaningful one as only The Favourite is hindered by this particular tidbit.

That’s where we stand at this point in Oscar season. A series of compelling statistics with each giving favor to one candidate over another. Overall, it looks like BlacKkKlansman, The Favourite, and Roma have the most support from these statistics, but almost anything could win based on them with Bohemian Rhapsody the least likely victor and Black Panther not far above it.