On Sunday, February 28, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will reveal this year’s Academy Award winners at the 88th Oscars ceremony. With 12 nominations, Alejandro Inarritu’s movie takes the lead as this year’s frontrunner for Best Picture, ahead of “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “The Martian,” “Bridge of Spies,” “Carol,” “Spotlight” and “The Big Short.”
Once again, the Academy Award won’t be crowning one of last year’s biggest box-office smashes, like “Jurassic World” or “Furious 7.” “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” is, however, up for five Oscars, although these are all in technical categories (sound editing, visual effects, etc.).
“The Martian” is this year’s highest-grossing nominee
Among the eight movies nominated for Best Picture, “The Martian” — directed by Ridley Scott — is the highest-grossing film globally, with $614.2mil. This comes ahead of George Miller’s “Mad Max: Fury Road,” which took $376.7M. “The Revenant”, although released later, has so far grossed $364.1M.
But history shows that there’s no need to rake in colossal sums at the box office to bag one of the Academy’s famous gongs. In 2010, “The Hurt Locker” won “Best Picture” with grosses of just $48.6M. This could give hope to the independent movies up for awards this year. “Spotlight,” for example, has only grossed $49.2M, and “Brooklyn” just $39.8M. The lowest-grossing movie among this year’s nominees is “Room,” at $11.5M. However, the film — which puts Brie Larson in the running for the “Best Actress” Oscar — has so far only been released in certain countries.
A handful of exceptions
Since records of global box-office takings began, the Best Picture Oscar has only been awarded to the previous year’s highest-grossing film a handful of times, for hits such as “Gone with the Wind,” “The Sound of Music,” “The Godfather,” “Rocky” and “Rain Man.”
More recent films to find success among moviegoers and Academy judges include “Titanic,” which won a record number of 11 Oscars in 1998 and became the first film to gross over a billion dollars at the box office. Three years earlier, “Forrest Gump” also scored success across the board, taking six Oscars and $677M worldwide, as the second-highest-grossing movie of 1994, after “The Lion King.”
The last movie to pull off the feat was “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,” the final movie in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, directed by Peter Jackson and released in 2003.
– AFP Relaxnews