Saturday, January 28, 2012

Fiction to Film: Oscar Nominees his Years Oscar Nominees vs the Past 10 Years

This year has the unique distinction of having 9 Best Picture nominees under the new rules.

Of those nine nominees, five are based on novels (The Descendants, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Help, Hugo, and War Horse)

Of the other four, three are original stories (The Artist, Midnight in Paris, The Tree of Life) and one is based on a non-fiction book (Moneyball)

This years stat with 55% of Academy Award best picture nominees coming from novels is significantly higher then the stats for the previous 10 year.

Nominees for Best Picture from Novel from the Previous 10 Year (2001-2010 films)

2010 films - best picture nominees: 2 of 10 adapted from a novel (Charles Portis' True Grit; Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone)

2009 films best picture nominees: 2 of 10 adapted from a novel (Saphire's Push [source material for Precious]; Walter Kirn's Up in the Air)

2008 films best picture nominees: 2 of 5 adapted from a novel (Vikas Swarup's Q & A [source material for Slumdog Millionaire]*; Bernard Schlink's The Reader)

2007 film best picture nominees: 3 of 5 adapated from a novel (Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men*; Ian McEwan's Atonement; Upton Sinclaire's Oil! [source material for There Will Be Blood])

• 2006 films best picture nominees: 0 of 5 adapted from a novel

• 2005 films best picture nominees: 0 of 5 adapted from a novel

• 2004 films best picture nominees: 1 of 5 adapted from a novel (Rex Pickett's Sideways)

• 2003 films best picture nominees: 3 of 5 adapted from novels (J.R.R. Tolkein's The Return of the King*, Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander, Dennis Lehane's Mystic River)

• 2002 films best picture nominees: 2 of 5 adapted from novels (J.R.R. Tolkein's The Two Towers, Michael Cunningham's The Hours)

• 2001 films best picture nominees: 1 of 5 adapted from novels (J.R.R. Tolkein's The Fellowship of the Ring)

This years percent of Oscar nominees from Novels - 5 of 9 nominees : 55.5%

The percent of Oscar nominees coming from Novels over the previous 10 years - 16 of 60 nominees: 26.6%

*won the Oscar for best picture

1 comment:

NeverTooEarlyMP said...

Very interesting stats here. Probably says something about the industry that they want the safety of something that's already succeeded in another format, or the fact that original stories are too risque for the Academy's tastes this year. Thanks for this!