The biggest Oscar bait movie, according to science
Ever since the very first time the red carpet was rolled out back in 1929, the Oscars have been considered the highest honour for any Hollywood producer, director or actor. Indeed, the desire to win an illustrious Oscar statuette has led to desperation in the past, with studios vying for guaranteed success by crafting movies that have been meticulously engineered for votes.
As the awards show began to grow in prominence, such movies became known as ‘Oscar bait’, with the term being used to describe a film that seems to have been made for the sole purpose of being attractive to Academy voters. Released in November or December of any given year, shortly before the eligibility window closes, so that they will be fresh in voters’ minds, these films are often based on significant historical individuals and events, with an established Hollywood star playing the lead role.
Recent ‘Oscar bait’ examples include 2017’s historical epic Darkest Hour, which depicted the times of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill through the years of the Second World War, and 2016’s Lion, which used provocative over-sentimentality to tug at the heartstrings of the Academy voters. Even in 2024, Michael Mann and Ridley Scott strived for obvious Oscar success with Ferrari and Napoleon, respectively, with both coming up short.
Still, none of these aforementioned films can compare to the one movie that was deemed the biggest piece of Oscar bait in the history of modern cinema.
Back in 2014, a paper in American Sociological Review set out to define the biggest Oscar bait movie according to a mathematical equation, with UCLA professors Gabriel Rossman and Oliver Schilke being the mavericks to take on the challenge. Evaluating approximately 3,000 movies released between 1985 and 2009, the pair used an algorithm to judge each film, which included factors like whether a major studio released it and whether the talent involved had already been nominated for an Oscar, among many other stipulations.
Their study showed that the biggest Oscar bait movie of the lot was the 1990 film Come See the Paradise, directed by Alan Parker. Starring Dennis Quaid and Tamlyn Tomita, it tells the story of a theatre projectionist in Los Angeles who is drafted in to fight in WWII, all while his Japanese-American wife and daughter are forced into an internment camp purely for their ethnicity.
Sadly for Parker, Quaid and everyone else involved, the film failed to make much of a splash commercially or critically, earning about $900,000 at the box office from a budget of $17.5million while also failing to gain any Oscar nominations at all. Still, the reception wasn’t entirely all doom and gloom, with Parker surprisingly receiving a Palme d’Or nomination for his efforts during the Cannes Film Festival of the same year.
