Single Oscar Nominee Examination

That was a dumb idea. 
I don't have as much time for special projects anymore. I've slowly filled up my calendar with annual or monthly projects (monthly top 10s, monthly movie previews, Emmy prep, Oscar Prep, Mid and End of year top movies and shows, college basketball predictions) in addition to my movie and delayed reactions that it's hard to carve out extra time for other investigations. All it takes is a small thought though. In this case it was "movies with only one Oscar nomination". The thought didn't even have a thesis. I just wanted to know what those movies looked like. Are there really that many? Are there more or less than their used to be? Are there any trends or categories that are most represented? My first thought was to see if this could be turned into a monthly top 10 list, which it will. I had no idea how long it would take to compile this list though (I feel like it's something I could've found collected on another site, but I don't trust outsourcing a job like this). There's more fun to be had with this than a simple top ten, so I've decided to break things down for some fun. 

Full List

Defining a Single Nomination Movie

It important to explain how I got to this list. I started by collecting a list of every Oscar nominee for the last 90 years. I cut out all of the short film categories (live-action, animated, documentary) since only features are ever really eligible for more than one nomination. The early years of the Oscars had a few cases of nominating a person for his/her body of work in a year rather than a specific film. I cut those out. I found some lists of movies with multiple Oscar nominations and cut all those out. After that, I went through each remaining movie and checked for duplicates. This was particularly useful for Foreign Films which in the 60s in particular would get a Foreign Film nomination one year then get acting or technical nominations a year or two later. Finally, since in the early days of the Documentary award, no distinction was made between a short and a feature, I checked the run-times for each film according to IMDB and cut out any that were under 40 minutes long (which is the length set by the Academy for a feature). That left me with a list of 2012 movies. I'm sure I messed up somewhere, but if this isn't at least 98% accurate, I'd be shocked.

Now I have this list and it's time for the fun to begin. You know what that means. Yes. It's time for some charts!

Note: When I mention years, I'm referring to the year all the movies came out, not the year of the Oscar ceremony. 

By Decade

The most surprising thing I found when I broke the numbers down is the consistency of how many single-nomination movies there have been. Every decade from 1950-Present has had between 207 and 237 total single nominees. The 1940s is only a little above that at 284, which could be excused as the Oscars still figuring categories out. There were only a couple years in the 1920s and the categories were really in flux then, so I wouldn't read anything into the 20s only have 31. The 2010s are already at 212 with two years left. It'll be a little above the standard range when all is said and done.

Of course, upon closer examination, maybe this consistency is not so impressive. The 50s and 60s have inflated numbers due to breaking categories like Cinematography and Costume Design into Color and Black-and-White categories. The Animated Feature category has only been around since 2001, which pads the 00s and 10s numbers a lot. I haven't broken down the numbers enough to say if the addition of Oscars for Sound Editing (1963), Visual Effects (inconsistent number of nominees despite being around since 1939), and Makeup and Hairstyling (1981) awards have increased or decreased the Single Nominee count otherwise. 

By Category

If you think trying to compare decades is futile, then get ready for category comparisons. No category has been consistent throughout. The number of nominees change. The names and breakdowns of the awards change*. Awards are introduced at different times.

*Screenplay used to also have an Original Story award. The Musical Score award has been broken up and combined several times. Cinematography, Costume Design, and Production Design were broken into Color and Black-and-White categories for many years. In the early days, even the Directing award had additional Dance Direction and Assistant Director awards.

So, I'll start with the raw numbers...

It should surprise no one to see Documentary and Foreign Film so high. They tend to be ghettoized, much like the Animated Feature award. Screenplay has so many single-nominees for two reasons: 1) I've lumped the Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, and Original Story awards together because of various inconsistencies and 2) the writers branch of the Academy has some of the most interesting choices every year.

This next graph gives us a better picture. Of all the films nominated in each category group, this is the percentage that are single-nominees.

That makes a little more sense. Documentary, Foreign Film, and Animated Feature are all significantly higher than the rest. The Original Song rules are so restrictive that it ends up having some bizarre nominees. Visual Effects is how they sneak in some blockbuster movies. I was a little surprised to see the share of Lead Acting nominations was bigger than Supporting. It makes sense though. It's easier for a Lead performance to stand out than a Supporting one. 

A few other observations:
-The Best Picture nominees all come from the early days of the Oscars. The most recent one was The Ox-Bow Incident in 1943. 

-The last time a film's only nomination was for directing was David Lynch for Mulholland Drive in 2001. Interestingly, Lynch's film Blue Velvet was also only nominated for his direction. 

-The Lead Actress to Lead Actor split is 90 Actresses to 53 Actors. I'm sure I could spin that as something very damning about the movie business without much effort.

-The Supporting split is much closer at 56 actresses to 51 actors. Over the last decade though, there have been only 2 single-nominee supporting actresses to 9 supporting actors. #Progress?

-As if there was any doubt about the Film Editing award's significance, it's the rarest of all single nominations by the raw numbers with only 22 unique nominees. The last one was Seven back in 1995.

Wins

Finally, I decided to look at how rare a single-nominee win at the Oscars is. The short answer is "pretty rare outside of a few obvious categories". As you'll see, the raw numbers and the percentages tell a similar story. Documentary, Foreign Film, and Animated Feature have a lot. The others don't. There's a tipping point. If most of the nominees in a category are single-nominee movies, then most of the winners will be single-nominee movies. The opposite is true as well. If there's only a 1 in 5 chance to win normally and on 23% of nominees are from single-nominee movies, the win % is going to be much lower.

There isn't much of note to pull out of those numbers. Film Editing has never been won by a single-nominee movie. It happened once for a film (Grand Hotel - 1932) and for direction, at the very first Oscars, and it was for Director of a Comedy. There's a greater share of wins for Supporting roles than Leading roles based on the raw numbers. I'd like to drill down into the reason for that some time. 

That's a good enough introduction for now. I'll have a few more posts over the next few days. Enjoy!