The least Oscar-baiting movie ever made, according to science

It might sound cynical, but most people know an Oscar-bait movie when they see one. Every year, dozens of films are released that clearly have at least one eye on the Academy Awards, and it’s often proven to be a double-edged sword.

For every nailed-on awards season contender that emerges and is instantly greeted as a front-runner in the major categories, another falls flat on its face. Whether it’s trying too hard, overestimating their own artistic merits, or simply reeking of a director and actor desperately trying to force themselves onto the podium, history is littered with awards-baiting prestige pictures that were laughed out of the building.

Folks with even a passing knowledge of how the industry works can take a look at the schedule of upcoming titles heading to cinemas between November and February and immediately pick out a handful destined to be in the running for the biggest prizes on offer. That’s not to say every single one of them is intended as Oscar bait, but neither is it a coincidence that the majority of nominees tend to be released in the same window.

Relative to how many titles hit multiplexes annually, only a tiny percentage of them are blatant Oscar bait. And yet, the machinations have become so obvious that science has worked out a methodology to determine which pictures are the ones that are quite clearly playing the game. At the complete opposite end of that spectrum exists a dismal psychological horror, which was named by science itself as the least Oscar-baiting movie ever made.

Compiling their findings from 25 years of data, Gabriel Rossman and Oliver Shilke applied an economic model to find out the scientific method of appealing to the Academy. Using 3000 Oscar-nominated movies released between 1985 and 2009, the duo used keywords related to plot and genre, release date, critical acclaim, box office performance, and the studios’ return on its investment to root out the movies that best fit the criteria.

The methodology can be applied to any feature whether it’s eying awards season glory or not, which is how the study settled upon Simon West’s 2006 effort When a Stranger Calls as the least Oscar-baiting movie ever made. A remake of the 1979 original and infinitely worse, the banal and by-the-numbers home invasion thriller with a murderous twist did at least recoup its budget more than four times over in ticket sales, which is the only positive thing anybody can say about it.

Whereas Alan Parker’s 1990 historical drama Come See the Paradise was outed as the most Oscar-baiting film ever committed to celluloid – which is bleakly hilarious in its own right, considering it wasn’t nominated for any – When a Stranger Calls is its polar opposite in every way.

Obviously, nobody’s going to watch a shitty genre flick and think they’re in the presence of a ‘Best Picture’ contender, but according to science, no movie has ever been further away from that distinction.

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