Given a suggestion from a commenter at The Film Experience (the same one who helped to correct a previous post), I took a look at how often any acting categories were fully represented by non-Best Picture nominees at the Oscars. Unsurprisingly, it’s rare.

Yet that wasn’t the most interesting point. It turns out that it’s far more likely, historically, that Best Actress nominees do not show up in Best Picture nominees, than any other acting category.

The chart above, put very simply - each color is an acting category, the x-axis is the number of nominations for that category overlapping with Best Picture, and the y-axis is the percentage of years in which that number of overlapping nominations occurred. So, most often for Best Actors, 3 nominees have appeared in Best Picture nominees, while 1 is most often the case for Best Actress nominees.

Two brief conclusions. One, it’s relatively rare for no nominees, within a single category, to come from Best Picture nominees (~3.5% of the time - just a little more common than full overlap within a category). Two, Best Actress nominees are far more likely to have come from films not nominated for Best Picture.

This one’s simple - just the average of the above. But it demonstrates the disparity more starkly - on average, 2.7 Best Actor nominees appear in Best Picture nominees, while 1.8 Best Actress nominees do the same. Best Supporting Actor and Actress fall right in the middle - though the gender disparity exists, it is less extreme. The data is clear - Best Actress nominees are found in Best Picture nominees much less often.

One could speculate as to why, but the most likely (though unsupported by any data I have) reason would be that Best Picture nominees are far less likely to feature prominent, fully-characterized roles for women. Much more often, historically, Best Actress nominees have come from “smaller” films - films like The Impossible , Albert Nobbs , Rabbit Hole , Julie and Julia , or _Rachel Getting Married, _just to pick an example for each of the five previous years. Keep in mind that I’m doing just that - picking notable, recent examples - which does not in any way prove an overall trend (though as the data shows in aggregate, there does exist a consistent trend, with lots of examples). Or, the equally troubling answer - films featuring prominent, strongly-performed female roles are under recognized when it comes to nominating Best Pictures. Neither has good implications for women in film.

Now to the real point of the article - instances during which an entire acting category came from non-Best Picture nominees. Here’s a breakdown of each time it’s happened (apologies for the size of the picture):

Again, not a hugely common occurrence - it hasn’t happened in any category since 2006. But clearly, it almost exclusively happens for Best Actress nominees.

Source: The Academy Awards Database