Oscar 2023 Best Picture noms make rare room for box-office hits

It’s the rare year when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the general American moviegoing public are in total agreement. The nominations for the Oscar 2023 were made on Tuesday morning. They included the best-reviewed movies by box-office standards. The Way of Water Avatar Maverick is the Top GunBoth were nominated for Best Picture. While this may not sound surprising, it hasn’t really happened for almost 50 years.

The most recent time it happened was a bit of a technicality, so in the mind of this Oscar trivia buff, it doesn’t actually count. 2010’s top-selling movies were Toy Story 3 Avatar. But AvatarThe film was originally released in 2009. It ended up being shown in theaters only a couple of months later. Because of this staggered release, the two movies weren’t even nominated for Best Picture in the same year; Toy Story 3The 83rd Oscars celebrated 2010’s releases and allowed me to enter the category. Avatar The 82nd ceremony was the same year as the one before.

To make this trivia-worthy: 1975 was the last year that the two top movies in the U.S. box office were both nominated at the Academy Awards for Best Picture. Jaws It topped the box-office and was awarded a Best Picture nomination One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s NestIt was second in the box office, and first at Academy Award Ceremony.

This feat was remarkable considering how rare it is. It also occurred again during the 1970s, when there were huge hits The Sting The ExorcistBoth were nominated for Best Picture in 1972. Most surprising, however, was 1970 when all five of the Top Five Movies received Best Picture nominations. Love Story, Airport, M*A*S*HPlease see the following: PattonThe award was eventually awarded to, It happened even more frequently in the ’60s, including a stretch between 1962 and 1965 where it happened every year. In those days, the Best Picture category had only five slots.

While it’s hard to imagine a box-office landscape similar to that of the ’60s and ’70s, when movies like Cuckoo’s NestOder The Sting could land in the top two of the year, 2023’s Oscars is certainly a lot more populist than it’s been in the past. Other than the nominations for the highest box-office earnings, there were also surprise hits that led the nominating list. Everything at once11 nominated for the title of “The Best,” However All You Need didn’t crack the top 10 of the year, it did manage to make over $70 million domestically off a comparatively tiny budget and over $100 million worldwide, which certainly makes it a hit, to say nothing of its status as a bit of a cultural phenomenon. ElvisAlso, eight nominees including Best Picture were received and the box office made more than $151 million domestically.

In other words, we may never return to the halcyon days of ’60s and ’70s cinema where the commercial and critical favorites were often one and the same, but this year’s crop of nominees certainly represents a much closer consensus that we’ve had any time recently. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that this year also happens to be the first in recent memory where superheroes weren’t box-office darlings.