Oscars 2024: Maybe we should ask why the Academy doesn’t like comedies or blockbusters than just “Barbie”?

The 96th Academy Award nominations were announced earlier this week, and while there’s been a great amount of joy regarding those have have been nominated at this year’s ceremony held on March 10 2024, there has been a very vocal uproar regarding two perceived snubs for “Barbie” - Margot Robbie for Best Actress and Greta Gerwig for Best Director.

Despite earning eight nominations, including a Best Screenplay nomination for Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, and “Barbie” earning the Best Picture nomination which would see its producer, Margot Robbie, earn that accolade alongside the other creatives behind the scenes, the cause celebre seems to be that while Ryan Gosling earned a Best Actor nod, Robbie did not earn a Best Actress.

Perhaps we should look at the Best Actress nominees and celebrate the fact that the sheer wealth of talent over the past 12 months of film from leading females, which meant Robbie was not in contention for the Award. Or maybe the fandom is right and that perhaps one of the other nominees didn’t deserve their nomination - it’s almost hard to say.

But for long-time fans or followers of the prestigious cinematic award ceremony, there has often been a discussion of what the Academy look for in the Best Picture, leading to the term “Oscar-bait” becoming part of our cinematic vocabulary now. Horror has long been considered too “niche” of a genre to ever become normalised as a regular Best Picture contender, but are comedy films treated in the same light?

What about those big box office blockbusters also, such as “Barbie” or another movie that seems to have flown under the “snubbed” radar, the incredibly successful “The Super Mario Bros. Movie,” which didn’t get a Best Original Song nod for Jack Black’s “Peaches,” and more surprisingly wasn’t even a nominee in the Best Animated Film category.

So we at NationalWorld have tried to do our due diligence and have a look back to when the Academy Awards first began, during an era of pre-code filmmaking, to determine if it could be true: do the Academy look down on comedy films and box office hits?

How many comedy films have won Best Picture at the Academy Awards?

Of the 95 pictures that have won the Academy Award for Best Picture, only 20 that are have won the award. The first comedy film to achieve that feat was “It Happened One Night” back at the 7th Academy Awards, while the most recent recipient of the Best Picture was “Everything Everywhere All at Once” at the 95th Academy Awards

• "It Happened One Night": 1934
• "You Can't Take It with You": 1938
• "Going My Way": 1944
• "An American in Paris": 1951
• "Around the World in 80 Days": 1956
• "Gigi": 1958
• "The Apartment": 1960
• "Tom Jones": 1963
• "My Fair Lady": 1964
• "The Sting": 1973
• "Annie Hall": 1977
• "Terms of Endearment": 1983
• "Driving Miss Daisy": 1989
• "Forrest Gump": 1994
• "Shakespeare in Love": 1998
• "Chicago": 2002
• "The Artist": 2011
• "Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)": 2014
• "Parasite": 2019
• “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (2022) 

How many Best Film Academy Awards have been won by that year’s highest-grossing film?

A big box office gross also isn't a guarantee for the Best Film award either; using information from Box Office Mojo and comparing the Best Film winner at each Academy Awards ceremony to that year’s highest-grossing film, only three have seen their financial success translate into Oscar success. They would be "Gone with the Wind" in 1939, “Casablanca” in 1942, “The Sound of Music” in 1965 and “Titanic” in 1997. More recently, “Avatar” was nominated for Best Picture in 2009, but lost to Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker.”

How many actresses have won “Best Actress” for a comedy role?

This is where fans of Margot Robbie might have a right to complain; despite comedy films not fairing well when it comes to the Best Film award, nor big box office pictures fairing well in the category either, there have been a good number of Best Actress winners from films that are considered comedies. 

21 of the Best Actress winners earned their awards from their roles in films considered comedies, with the first being Marie Dressler for “Min and Bill” at the 4th Academy Awards and Michelle Yeoh the most recent recipient for “Everything Everywhere All At Once” at last year’s event.

• Marie Dressler  - "Min and Bill" (1930)
• Claudette Colbert - "It Happened One Night" (1934)
• Loretta Young - "The Farmer's Daughter" (1947)
• Judy Holliday - "Born Yesterday" (1950)
• Audrey Hepburn - "Roman Holiday" (1953)
• Julie Andrews - "Mary Poppins" (1964)
• Katharine Hepburn - "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (1967)
• Barbra Streisand  - "Funny Girl" (1968 - tied with Kathryn Hepburn that year)
• Glenda Jackson - "A Touch of Class" (1973)
• Ellen Burstyn - "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" (1974)
• Faye Dunaway - "Network" (1976)
• Diane Keaton - "Annie Hall" (1977)
• Shirley MacLaine - "Terms of Endearment" (1983)
• Cher - "Moonstruck" (1987)
• Jessica Tandy - "Driving Miss Daisy" (1989)
• Helen Hunt - "As Good as It Gets" (1997)
• Gwyneth Paltrow - "Shakespeare in Love" (1998)
• Jennifer Lawrence - "Silver Linings Playbook" (2012)
• Emma Stone - "La La Land" (2016)
• Olivia Colman - "The Favourite" (2018)
• Michelle Yeoh - "Everything Everywhere All at Once" (2023)

When does the 96th Academy Awards ceremony take place?

The 96th Academy Awards will take place on Sunday 10 March 2024 and will begin at 11pm UK time with the ceremony expect to last until 2am the following morning.