‘The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King’: the most Oscar-bait winner in history
“Oscar bait” is a term that gets thrown around a lot in water cooler conversations during Awards season—that is, assuming anyone’s workplace still has a water cooler. We all have a fair idea of what the term means, although there’s never been an official definition. In essence, an Oscar-baiting film seems to have been produced solely for the purpose of winning Academy Awards, and it usually has a negative connotation.
For example, a great movie that happens to win an Oscar is one thing, but an Oscar-baiting movie that has a veil of prestige but seemingly little else to offer is something else entirely. It all makes you wonder, though: what is the most Oscar-baiting movie to have actually won ‘Best Picture’? Science has given us an answer – and it will shock you.
In 2014, University of California, Los Angeles professors Gabriel Rossman and Oliver Schilke decided to put an end to any confusion by scientifically defining what is and isn’t Oscar bait. They published a paper in the American Sociological Review entitled Close, But No Cigar: The Bimodal Rewards to Prize-Seeking. Their overall finding was that studios spending a lot of money on Oscar-baiting films can certainly be a ticket to awards, prestige, and improved box office, but a heavy risk is attached. Suppose the studio spends all that money and the film doesn’t connect with audiences. In that case, its perceived Oscar-bait qualities will turn public opinion against it and negatively affect the box office.
First, the professors compiled their data set: 3,000 Academy Award-eligible movies released between 1985 and 2009. Then, they developed a way to measure what makes a film most likely to be favoured by the Academy. These factors included release date, whether the film was made by a major studio, and whether the stars, directors, or writers had received previous nominations.
Another key factor was how many IMDB keywords most associated with the Oscars each film clocked up. The keywords most commonly attached to Oscar darlings included “family tragedy,” “domestic servant,” “Pulitzer prize source,” “whistleblower,” and “Watergate.” Amusingly, keywords that had never come within a sniff of the Oscars included “zombie,” “breast implant,” and “food fight.”
After crunching the numbers, Rossman and Schilke came up with a list of the top ten most Oscar-baiting movies released over those 24 years. It included heavyweights like Born on the Fourth of July, Jackie Brown, Schindler’s List, and The Aviator, in addition to efforts that didn’t quite make it like The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada.
However, the most interesting findings came in the top two positions. The most Oscar-bait film was Come See the Paradise, a little-known 1990 drama starring Dennis Quaid as a movie projectionist who goes off to fight in World War II while his Japanese-American wife and daughter are thrown in an internment camp at home in Los Angeles. The film had all the elements that usually set movies up for Academy Award glory, but it was one of the risks that didn’t pay off, as its reviews were middling, and it sank without a trace at the box office.
Number two on Rossman and Schilke’s list, though, did win the big one in 2004 – so Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is, according to science, the most Oscar-baiting ‘Best Picture’ winner in history.
This result may throw cinephiles for a loop, though, as Jackson’s beloved LOTR pictures certainly wouldn’t usually be mentioned in conversations about cynical attempts by studios to curry favour at the Oscars. The Return of the King did win many awards, but that was because it was the third entry in a beloved, industry-changing event franchise, not because it specifically set out to win Oscars. Hell, no fantasy film had ever won ‘Best Picture’ before, so it would’ve been a massive gamble by New Line Cinema if all it wanted was a Little Gold Man.
