Is popularity important to receive an Academy Award?

by Ana Luiza Albacete, Rayssa Cavalcanti, Jeff Viray, and Luke Shikhashvili.

Many people go to the movies to take a break from all the chaos that real life brings. But in recent years escaping the chaos can be inside the comfort of your house. 

According to statistics at thenumbers.com, we can see that because of the Pandemic, attendance in movie theaters has slowed down in the United States and Canada. Even though streaming has a good approach attendance in the theaters may increase since the pandemic is almost over. 

The number of movie tickets sold in the United States and Canada from 1995 to 2022:

However, how to talk about films without talking about the biggest award? The 95th Academy Award took place last week and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” took all the main categories. What about this movie's popularity? Do the Oscars have to reward the most popular movie? 

According to Rotten Tomatoes among the Best Picture Nominations, Everything, Everywhere All at Once was the third most popular movie. Coming before Top Gun: Maverick and The Banshees of Inisherin. 

Popularity of Best Picture Nominations

Popularity = Award?

Even though the most popular movie at the Oscars was Top Gun and this movie did not win a single category, Avatar: The Way of Water broke records by making more than 2 billion dollars at the box office. But it only won the Visual Effects award - different from James Cameron’s first movie of the saga which got three awards at the 2009 ceremony. 

“Black Panther” did get some categories in 2019, the sequence “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever” did not succeed in the award, but at the box office, it made more than 800 million dollars. While the biggest winner, Everything, Everywhere All at Once did only 100 million dollars and the second most popular movie, The Banshees of Inisherin, did only 47 million dollars at the box office.  

What about Canadians?

Well, this year the Oscars had three Canadians winning important categories: Brandan Fraser won Best Actor Category for “The Whale”, Sarah Polley won Best Adapted Screenplay for “Women Talking” and Daniel Roher won Best Documentary for “Navalny”.

Since the nominations were announced on January 24th there has been a high demand for the research of Brendan Fraser and Sarah Polley's names on Google. According to Google Trends, Brendan Fraser was back and people were interested in the actor's new movie. Sarah Polley did not reach the same popularity, but still, people were interested in searching for her. Meanwhile, Daniel Roher's name was not even much on the record of the searches, even though his award-winning movie is streaming on Crave right now.