How much for your consideration? Best Picture

Let's review the best picture Academy Award winners over the last ten years, and the production budget that got them there.

2005 - Crash ($6.5M)
2004 - Million Dollar Baby ($30M)
2003 - The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King ($94M)
2002 - Chicago ($45M)
2001 - A Beautiful Mind ($60M)
2000 - Gladiator ($103M)
1999 - American Beauty ($15M)
1998 - Shakespeare in Love ($25M)
1997 - Titanic ($200M)
1996 - The English Patient ($27M)

So, one movie makes it in under $10M, and two crack the $100M mark. The rest are in what I like to call the 'mediocre' range.

The average winning movie cost $65M. Let's just compare that to the average cost of a Hollywood studio movie; you guessed it, about $65M. So what does this tell us. Well, on average, any studio movie has as much chance of winning Best Picture as any other, regardless of budget. This doesn't mean that any movie has an equal chance of winning, of course, just any "studio movie". The only movie on the list not produced by one of the big six studios is Crash, which was "independently produced" and then distributed by Lions Gate.

So it appears that any studio film has an equal chance of winning the best picture award - based on budget alone, although presumably making a good film will give you a slightly higher chance. Occasionally, an independent film might sneak through too. Based purely on the numbers over the last ten years, my vote for this year therefore goes to Babel; at $25M the closest to the average of the five movies nominated this year - $30.6M. Having said that, you'd have to be an idiot to bet against Clint Eastwood (Letters from Iwo Jima); the Academy loves that guy! Well, he was born only 1 year after the first Academy Award ceremony, and at 77 is probably the same age as the average Academy member

Now I haven't even mentioned the marketing that goes into getting nominations and votes for the Oscars, which is obscene (millions of dollars - they probably spent a lot more with the "for your consideration" campaign for Crash than they did making the bloody movie). But I'll leave that for another rant.

Let the most average win.