Essay The Academy Awards(Best Picture): A Statistical Analysis

Submitted By nicolepalmer
Words: 1453
Pages: 6

Nicole Palmer
Mr. Noordam
MDM 4U
Friday November 14, 2014

Table of Contents

Title Page..........................................................................................................................................i
Table of Contents ii Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………….1
1-Variable Analysis(X) 2
1-Variable Analysis(Y) 4
2-Variable Analysis 6
Conclusion 8
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………….…………...…9

Introduction The purpose of this report is to investigate the effect the production budget of a movie has on its performance at the Academy Awards. Each year, hundreds of millions of people worldwide watch the television broadcast of the Academy Awards ceremony, at which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) honor film-making from the previous year. Almost 6,000 members of AMPAS vote for the nominees and final winners of Academy Awards, more commonly known as Oscars, in a range of categories for directing, acting, writing, editing, etc. Oscars have been presented for outstanding achievement in film every year since 1928, and are generally recognized to be the premier award of their kind as AMPAS voting members are themselves the foremost workers in the motion picture industry. However, while studies into the factors that impact a movie’s economic success show that awards can boost revenues, there is little overall association between budget and nomination variables and the most important movie awards, the Oscars. This paper aims to change that.

Overview of Procedure In collecting the data used in this report, I was able to find a list of every movie that has ever been nominated or won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Then, I manually entered what the estimated production budget was for each movie. Production budgets are not always made available to the general public, which made this part challenging. Another issue I came across was that occasionally if the production budget was available it was only in British Pounds (£); meaning I had to convert it to the currency all of the other budgets were in: American Dollars. I also entered the total number of nominations manually, double checking each one to ensure it was accurate. Throughout the report the data will be referred to as a “sample” instead of a “population” because not every film ever nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award was evaluated. Additionally, please note that a film production budget determines how much money will be spent on the entire film project. It involves the identification and estimation of cost items for each phase of filmmaking (development, pre-production, production, post-production and distribution).

First Variable Analysis (X): Estimated Production Budgets

The following two graphs and table of calculations represent the estimated production budget of every Oscar nominated movie for the years 1999 to 2014. Looking at the histogram, it is evident that the vast majority of Academy Award nominated movie production budgets are under $100,000,000. The histogram also has a right skew displaying the idea that many of the movies are making far less than the mean. As the budget increases, less movies are represented.

The box and whisker plot has a very short whisker on the left, indicating that the first 25% of the data is very tightly clustered. The right whisker identifies many high outliers in the upper 25% of the data. The best suited measurements for the data are the median and the Inter-Quartile Range (IQR) due to these outliers.

The production budgets range from $1,700,000 to $237,000,000 whereas the inner 50% is only from $16,250,000 to $60,750,000 creating an IQR of $44,500,000. The box and whisker plot also shows that most (75%) of the movies have estimated production budgets below $60,750,000. The median is $29,500,000,