The greatest year in Oscars history, according to science

Whether we feign interest or openly disdain it, the Academy Awards manage to infiltrate the public consciousness every year, sparking heated debates and resigned sighs over the predictable, often uninspired choices made by the esteemed Academy.

The criteria for declaring any project the ‘best’ at anything feel increasingly convoluted and subjective, with members often influenced by factors unrelated to filmmaking or rewarding films we vehemently disagree with. Case in point: awarding Bohemian Rhapsody ‘Best Editing’—a decision I’ve yet to recover from. Over the years, cinephiles have scoured Oscar nominations in search of the “best” year, perhaps in an attempt to redeem the institution’s credibility by identifying a year when they truly got it right. But with the arrival of a recent study, could there finally be a concrete way to determine this?

While some might argue that art and science don’t mix, Daniel Parris would beg to differ. He has created a study aimed at determining the greatest year in Oscar history—according to science. To evaluate the quality of the nominations from each year, Parris compiled data that factored in online rankings of each film, lists curated by film critics, and the box office success of the projects. By analysing the data across these categories, Parris arrived at a surprising conclusion about the greatest year in Oscars history.

Firstly, Parris pooled together all the lists from each decade that the Oscars have been running, looking at the number of ‘Best Picture’ nominees. He then looked at the lists compiled by film critics of the greatest films of all time, searching for the years and decades that were most prominent on those lists based on the movie included. Lastly, Parris collected the data for the average gross profit for the ‘Best Picture’ nominees, which was also split into decades. 

After merging all of this data together, the study concluded that 1939 was the greatest year in Oscars history, with the likes of Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Mr Smith Goes to Washington and Goodbye, Mr Chips. Gone with the Wind won a total of 21 awards, scooping in nearly all categories for ‘Best Actress’, ‘Best Actor’, ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Directing’. 

However, the films of the seventies and nineties came fairly close, with classic films such as Jaws, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Nashville and Barry Lyndon all being nominated in 1975 and Titanic, Good Will Hunting and LA Confidential being nominated in 1997.  

There is never a way of truly determining whether the Academy have made the correct decision and each year, it feels like they’re either over-compensating for a mistake made the previous year or making decisions based on what will be least controversial, but sometimes create controversy by doing this and making bland decisions that don’t honour the work being made. But now that we maybe have a more concrete way of looking at the overall data, perhaps we won’t need to argue as much about the results, and we can all sit in the comfort of our best days in the past. 

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