uh oh, Oscar statistics

So I was reading this article by Dan Kois noting that Nomadland, which just swept the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director (second woman ever to have won that award), and Best Actress, "is one of only six movies focused on the lives and stories of women ever to win" Best Picture. "By my count," the author says.

That's potentially subjective, and requires familiarity with all the individual movies to judge, but something else Kois says is more easily measurable. "When men get nominated for Best Actor, their movies are Best Picture contenders, I wrote. When women get nominated for Best Actress, too often their movies are not."

I have a database. I can count that up real fast. So I did. Going first from 2010, when is when the number of Best Picture nominees was increased to 8-10, I find the number of Best Leading Actor/Actress finalists that are also nominated for Best Picture comes out like this:

Number    Actor      Actress
  0
  1                    3
  2         2          4
  3         3          4
  4         6          1
  5         1

That's an average of 2.25 for women, 3.5 for men.

Going back to 1945-2009, the period in which there were 5 Best Picture nominees (throughout this period and since, there's always been 5 nominees for the acting awards), I find:

Number    Actor      Actress
  0         1          8
  1         9         27
  2        21         20
  3        24          8
  4         8          1
  5         2          1

That's an average of about 1.5 for women, about 2.5 for men. It's not as overwhelming a tendency as Kois's wording implies, but it's a decidedly strong - and lasting - bias.

The one year that all 5 Best Leading Actress nominees were also in movies nominated for Best Picture, by the way, was 1978, when Diane Keaton won for Annie Hall, which also won for Best Picture, and her competitors were Jane Fonda in Julia, Marsha Mason in The Goodbye Girl, and both Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine in The Turning Point. (The Best Picture nominee that didn't have a Best Actress nominee in it was Star Wars.) Of those four movies, two have relationships between women at or near the center of the story; two emphatically don't. Take that for what it's worth. (The year that no Best Actor nominees were nominated for Best Picture was 2007, but I don't know anything about most of those movies in either category, so will refrain from analyzing.)