Those Best Picture nominees still in theaters did not get much of an Oscar bump in 2024. We’re a long way from the days when the imprimatur of an Academy Award nomination excited the public enough to spin box office gold.

Since TheWrap is the only outlet reporting on this with anything close to honesty, here’s its math…

The problem is not the pandemic. Nor is it these shortened theatrical windows. If it were, Barbie would not have made $1.5 billion worldwide.

What’s changed is that Oscar has lost touch with normal people. There was a time when an Oscar nomination could turn a little drama about divorce into 1979’s top-grossing movie. Those of us who love movies would look at the Oscar nominations and then run out to see them so we could watch the telecast and choose who to root for. Back then, we trusted Oscar.

[Precisely. I also used to enjoy Oscar telecasts for this same reason. The speeches got more and more politically tendentious, which made them less enjoyable, but I stopped watching mainly because the nominations were increasingly irrelevant. Any film I enjoyed was almost certain not to get a nomination, and any film that got nominations became less and less likely to be enjoyable. “The Shape of Water” was the nadir of that trend, a film so bad that I predicted in my review that it would win Best Picture — and it did. Nolte speaks for me in every syllable of this essay. Maybe he and I should combine up for the Redneck Oscars. We could call them the Bubbas. — Ed]