The Oscars- Breaking Down the Numbers
With the 93rd Academy Awards imminent, Hollywood braces itself for what has been a wildly unusual year, full of reschedules and postponement of highly anticipated films.
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What’s good everyone?
The 93rd Academy Awards are set to be underway in just a few hours, and for the first time, it is to be held at 2 different venues: The Dolby Theatre, at Hollywood Boulevard, Los Angeles, where it has been held since 2002 and the Union Station, an 82-year-old mass transit hub in downtown Los Angeles, 8 miles (or 11 stops on the Metro B Line) from the Dolby Theatre.
But why is the Red Carpet of the most prestigious award show in the show business held at a train station? Organizers say it is to keep the pandemic from turning a typical packed Oscar ceremony into a potential superstar-spreader event by splitting it between two locations- the Hollywood theater and the train station.
With movie theatres around the world being mostly shut for the past 14 months since the Oscars were last held, it has been a very unusual year, with highly anticipated films such as No Time to Die, featuring Daniel Craig as James Bond for one final time, the 4th edition of the Matrix starring Keanu Reeves, Top Gun: Maverick seeing Tom Cruise reprise his role as Pete ‘Maverick’ Mitchell and even James Cameron’s Avatar Sequels delayed because of the pandemic.
While most of these films have now opted for a hybrid Theatre and Streaming simultaneous release plan later in the year or Summer 2022, this year’s Oscars also feature some noteworthy nominations, with bookies favoring Chinese director Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland, which won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture-Drama earlier this year, to bag the Best Movie title at the Oscars too.
For Best Actor, Chadwick Boseman best known for his role in Black Panther, leads the race for his depiction of a day in Ma Rainey’s life, an influential blues singer in Chicago in the 1920’s, in the movie Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. This would be the first time an actor would win the award posthumously, with Boseman passing away last year after succumbing to his battle with Cancer.
Carey Mulligan, who shot to fame for her roles in films such as Pride and Prejudice, The Great Gatsby, and Drive, leads the line for the Best Actress award, for playing Cassandra Thomas in Promising Young Woman, a 30-year-old medical school dropout, who seeks to avenge the death of her best friend, who was a victim of rape.
Like every year, WalletHub publishes its Oscars Facts Reports, and here’s a breakdown of the numbers behind the 2021 Academy Awards:
$130 Million: Rough estimation of the economic boost that the city of Los Angeles gets annually from the Oscars.
$129 Million-plus: The amount of Ad revenue that ABC (American Broadcasting Company) which holds the rights to The Oscars, will rake in from broadcasting the award show on Sunday.
$100 Million-plus: Amount spent by Hollywood on lobbying for the Oscars every year.
$40 Million-plus: The total cost of this year’s ceremony.
23.6 Million: This is how many viewers tuned in to the show in 2020, which was down 20% from 2019.
$10 Million: The total cost of the look for an A-list actress attending the Oscars. The average is a mere $1.5 million and for a first-timer, roughly $266,000 will do the trick. The most expensive thus far was Cate Blanchett’s 2014 attire at $18.1 million.
$9 Million: Average Box Office increase in a Film’s revenue after winning the title of Best Picture as the Oscars.
$2 Million: This is the cost of a 30-second commercial during the Oscars telecast (64% less than the Super Bowl).
$225,000: Average worth of the coveted Oscars goodie bag given to all nominees.
$92,000: Price for a couple to attend the Vanity Fair Oscar Party. This is the most expensive of all the after-parties.
$78,000: In 2020, the most expensive goodie-bag item was a 12-day cruise on the Scenic Eclipse yacht.
$72,000: Average cost for a page one Ad in The Hollywood Reporter during Oscar season.
$24,700: The 50,000-square-foot Oscars red carpet costs a pretty penny and it’s a time-consuming effort. It took 900 hours for a crew of 18 workers to install.
$12,500: The cost for streaming one film for voters of the Oscar nominees and it’s a huge saving compared to the old-fashioned and not eco-friendly option of making and mailing physical copies to voters, which costs $1 million per film.
$400: This is estimated as the current value of the 24-karat gold-plated Oscar statuette though to a winner, these are priceless.
50%: The Golden Globes has a 10-year record of predicting the Oscar for Best Picture. Could this be a good sign for Nomadland?
32%: This is the share of this year’s Oscar nominees who are women and it’s the highest percentage ever. In total, 70 women received 76 nominations this year.
4th: This year will be the fourth where the show will go on without a host.
1st: Riz Ahmed is a standout as the first Muslim in Oscar history to be nominated in the Best Actor category for his stellar performance in Sound of Metal.
1st: Steven Yeun is the first-ever Asian-American actor to be recognized in the Best Actor category for his incredible performance in Minari.
Despite plummeting ratings in recent years, the Academy Awards remain the most coveted award show on the planet, and the pandemic-struck film industry is not changing that.
It remains to be seen how different the grandeur of the event would be without a crowd and host, but as someone rightly said:
“Our minds are big enough to contemplate the cosmos but small enough to care about who wins an Oscar”
I doubt this year will be any different. Have a good one guys, and we’ll talk tomorrow.
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Originally published at https://incentify.substack.com.
