And the nominees for an Oscar are ...

By Meg Sullivan

If you're an actor angling for an Academy Award nomination, you better hope you didn't leave the audience rolling in the aisles, suggests a new study from UCLA's California Center for Population Research.

The 80th Academy Awards nominations were announced Jan. 23 at the Academy's Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. At least some of this year’s nominees for best actor, including George Clooney, Daniel Day-Lewis and Tommy Lee Jones, would probably agree with what a UCLA-Harvard study revealed are the strongest predictors for Oscar nominations.

"The odds of being nominated for an Academy Award are so much greater for performers who appear in dramas that — at least this time of year — it really pays to be a drama queen," said Gabriel Rossman, one of the study's two authors and an assistant professor of sociology at UCLA.

Albeit to a lesser degree, it also helps to have a major film distributor, prior Oscar nominations, a high spot in the pecking order in past movie credits, fewer films competing for attention and good collaborators. And it doesn't hurt to be a woman.

"A performer's odds of being nominated are largely set before the cameras even start rolling, back when the script was bought, the director was signed and the film was cast," said Nicole Esparza, the study's lead author and a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at Harvard University. "It's surprising how many variables other than a performer's talent play a role in determining who gets nominated."

Using Internet Movie Database records for every Oscar-eligible film made between the founding of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences in 1927 and 2005, Esparza and Rossman looked for conditions that improved the odds of a performer getting the nod.

The researchers looked at number of Oscar-eligible films in any given year, the distributors and studios behind each performer's films, the film's tone or subject matter, the cast size, the sex of the performer, the performer's contacts within the industry, and past Oscar nominations among a film's cast, directors and writers.

The single greatest predictor of a nomination proved to be serious subject matter — or at least a film that was classified by the database as a drama, despite the possible presence of comedic elements. In examining records on 171,539 performances by 39,518 actors in 19,351 Oscar-eligible films, the researchers found that actors were nine times more likely to receive a nomination for their work in a drama than in a non-drama.

"In the entertainment industry, there's long been a sense that the nomination process prefers dramas, but I don't think anybody is aware of the magnitude of the effect," Rossman said.

The second strongest predictor of a nomination proved to be the number of films screened in any given year.

"It's better to be nominated in a year when fewer films were screened, because there's less competition come awards time," Rossman said.

Actresses, meanwhile, proved more than twice as likely to be nominated as actors for any given performance, making being female the study's third strongest predictor of a nomination, the authors say.

"At least in this case, being underrepresented on the job works in women's favor," said Esparza. "Because there are fewer female than male performers in films, and both are eligible for the same number of awards, actresses stand a better chance of being nominated than actors. It's a simple matter of arithmetic, but as far as I know, nobody has ever raised the point."

The higher a performer ranked in past movie credits, the more likely he or she was to be nominated. A history of high rankings in the movie-credit pecking order more than doubled the odds of a nomination, making pecking order in past credits the fourth strongest predictor, the researchers found.

"It turns out the performers with enough clout and respect from their peers to push themselves to the top of the credits also have enough clout and respect from their peers to be nominated for Oscars," Rossman said.

Having a major distributor also provided a boost. Coming in as the fifth most likely predictor, appearing in a film represented by a major film distributor nearly doubled a performer's chances of being nominated. And having been nominated for an Oscar in the past also improved the odds of being nominated.

The complete study can be found at http://ccpr.ucla.edu/asp/ccpr_035_06.asp.