Nielsen Company Tells You Oscar Facts You Never Knew You Wanted To Know

By Katey Rich

Can you believe it? This is my last post here before the Oscar ceremony. The weird thing about being an Oscar obsessive is that you secretly ponder all these questions for months, and then all of a sudden this week everyone around you is saying, "Hey, what's that Amy Ryan all about?" Or you start a sentence with something like "Of course, without a Best Editing nomination it's really hard to win Best Picture..." and suddenly realize, no, not everyone knows Oscar arcana. I'm co-hosting an Oscar party with a friend who, like most Americans, has seen zero of the Best Picture nominees. It's a strange time to be an Oscar wonk, indeed.

Parent company Nielsen, in traditional number-crunching fashion, has given us all sorts of facts to ponder as we go into what Hollywood is calling Oscar Weekend, and what I'm calling Clean-My-Apartment-And-Maybe-Go-Have-A-Drink-With-Friends-And-Then-Watch-The-Oscars Weekend. Some of the "findings" are in the "no-duh" category: People on the coasts are more likely to watch the ceremony? Sales of the books on which the movies were based spike after the awards? Bloggers talk more about the Oscars during Oscar season? Faaaaaascinating. But those Nielsen statistic monkeys surprise you sometimes. I had merrily assumed that all five Best Picture nominees had gotten box-office bumps following the nominations, but No Country's wide expansion made little difference in its overall gross, and Atonement continued on the sharp attendance decline it had been experiencing for weeks. The tailor-made Oscar epic is actually less popular, box-office-wise, than difficult drama Michael Clayton.

Members of Nielsen's network Hey! Nielsen have also been putting in some Oscar predictions of their own; at this point in the game pretty much everyone is allowed to have an opinion, so let's see what they say. For most part they're down with the party line-- No Country, Daniel Day-Lewis, The Coens for director, Ratatouille for animated feature. But they're supporting Ellen Page for Best Actress by a healthy margin--33%--and have a dead tie between Cate Blanchett and Ruby Dee for Best Supporting Actress. An example of the public not knowing what the Academy will like, or a sign of the winds of change? I'm tending to think the former-- the fact that Ellen Page is also in the most popular Best Picture nominee is no coincidence-- but we'll only know late Sunday night.

And finally, the Nielsen-bots send us off with a factoid so random, and so specific, that it makes me a little afraid. "Academy Award viewers also tend to be health-conscious consumers of wine, nuts, pretzels, yogurt, liquor, health bars, trail mix, coffee, pudding and popcorn." Wait, liquor is healthy now? And wait, how do they know this? I buy all of these things. Are they following me to the bodega around the corner when I get the afternoon snack pangs? And wait, liquor is healthy now? Great news for my Oscar party, at least.

For those of you anxious for some Oscar predictions that don't come from the good people of Hey! Nielsen, they're coming fast and furious all over the place. Some of the most accurate will likely be from the big aggregates, like Gurus o' Gold, the LA Times Buzzmeter, and the more populist Sultans of Bling over at Awards Daily. Those are probably much better guesses to go on than my own, though as Awards Daily always insists, "Nobody knows anything."

I'll be a little sad on Monday morning when everybody knows everything, and all that's left is to parse the results for a few days before bracing ourselves for summer movie season, and a long six months (at least!) before any of next year's Oscar contenders come out in earnest. I think back to my first day of last fall's New York Film Festival, when I saw The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and was utterly floored by it. It never occurred to me that attending that festival would give me a better leg up on awards season than ever before, or that this would finally be the first year in which I saw all five Best Picture nominees before the big night (Michael Clayton snuck in under the wire on Monday.) I've loved this Oscar season, with all the strike-related woe and No Country for Old Men sweeps, and I'll be sad to see it go. But you know what? I've got to make some room in this head of mine, and this blog, to get excited about The Dark Knight and Indiana Jones. Let's take a moment to hug our Oscar statues and thank our agents, and then on to the popcorn and explosions!