Every year I try to watch every Oscar nominated film between when the nominees are announced in January and when the show finally happens in late February, and every year it ends up being a desperate race between my free time and my dwindling ability to stomach yet another biopic. But this year seems to be an easier go than in the past. As it turns out, there’s a very good reason for that: the list of films to see is significantly shorter.

The 2018 feature-length films nominated in at least one category for the 2019 ceremony are:

A Quiet Place A Star is Born At Eternity’s Gate Avengers: Infinity War Black Panther BlacKkKlansman Bohemian Rhapsody Border Can You Ever Forgive Me? Capernaum (foreign) Christopher Robin Cold War First Man First Reformed Free Solo (documentary) Green Book Hale County This Morning, This Evening (documentary) If Beale Street Could Talk Incredibles 2 (animated) Isle of Dogs Mary Poppins Returns Mary Queen of Scots Minding the Gap (documentary) Mirai (animated) Never Look Away (foreign) Of Fathers and Sons (documentary) Ralph Breaks the Internet (animated) RBG Ready Player One Roma Shoplifters (foreign) Solo: A Star Wars Story Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (animated) The Ballad of Buster Scruggs The Favourite The Wife Vice

(Films in bold, “singletons”, received only one nomination, but that nomination was not for Documentary, Animated, or Foreign.)

(Incidentally, at present I’ve seen all but two of those, with 10 days still to go before the ceremony.)

That may seem like a lot of movies (although it’s a small fraction of the more than 700 films released in 2018), but it’s actually a significant dip from previous Oscar years:

As you can see, 2018 is actually the lowest year on record since at least 2009, the first year the Oscars expanded the Best Picture category beyond five nominees. The average nominee count between 2009 and 2017 is 43.2, putting 2018 six films below average, or nearly 14%.

What could be causing this effect? Let’s examine the 2012 and 2016 nominee lists, which represent the decade’s highest and lowest nomination counts before this year. (Note: throughout this article, I refer always to the year the nominees were released, not the year when the ceremony took place. Ex. the 2012 nominees were released in 2012 and awarded in 2013.)

2012 nominees:

5 Broken Cameras (documentary) A Royal Affair (foreign) Amour Anna Karenina Argo Beasts of the Southern Wild Brave (animated) Chasing Ice Django Unchained Flight Frankenweenie (animated) Hitchcock How to Survive a Plague (documentary) Kon-Tiki (foreign) Les Misérables Life of Pi Lincoln Mirror Mirror Moonrise Kingdom No (foreign) ParaNorman (animated) Prometheus Searching for Sugar Man (documentary) Silver Linings Playbook Skyfall Snow White and the Huntsman Ted Marvel’s The Avengers The Gatekeepers (documentary) The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey The Impossible The Invisible War (documentary) The Master The Pirates! Band of Misfits (animated) The Sessions War Witch (foreign) Wreck-It Ralph (animated) Zero Dark Thirty

(I took my Oscar watching less seriously back then, and have still only seen 16 of those.)

2016 nominees:

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi 13th (documentary) 20th Century Women A Man Called Ove Allied Arrival Captain Fantastic Deepwater Horizon Doctor Strange Elle Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them Fences Fire at Sea (documentary) Florence Foster Jenkins Hacksaw Ridge Hail, Caesar! Hell or High Water Hidden Figures I Am Not Your Negro (documentary) Jackie Jim: The James Foley Story Kubo and the Two Strings La La Land Land of Mine (foreign) Life Animated (documentary) Lion Loving Manchester by the Sea Moana Moonlight My Life as a Zucchini (animated) Nocturnal Animals O.J.: Made in America (documentary) Passengers Rogue One: A Star Wars Story Silence Star Trek Beyond Suicide Squad Sully Tanna (foreign) The Jungle Book The Lobster The Red Turtle (animated) The Salesman (foreign) Toni Erdmann (foreign) Trolls Zootopia (animated)

(Films in bold, “singletons”, received only one nomination, but that nomination was not for Documentary, Animated, or Foreign.)

(I did better in 2016, seeing 24 of the nominees.)

38 nominees in 2012, 47 in 2016. Could this be a case of the Oscars having fewer total nominations in 2012? Not really. Oscar slates typically have the same number of total nominations because, with a few exceptions, the number of slots in each category and the categories themselves remain the same. In recent years, the Oscars have had 18 feature categories that always have five nominees each, for a total of 90 nominations; one category, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, that always has three nominees (so 93 nominations); one category, Best Animated Feature, which almost always has five nominees (the exception was 2010, which had only three; all other years we’re up to 98); and the Best Picture category, which has ranged since 2009 between eight and ten nominees (106 – 108 total). So there is very little variance in the total number of nominations:

2009 – 108

2010 – 106

2011 – 107

2012 – 107

2013 – 107

2014 – 106

2015 – 106

2016 – 107

2017 – 107

2018 – 106

In fact, the 2012 slate, which nominated only 38 different films, and the 2016 slate, which nominated 47 different films, both had 107 total nominations. So that doesn’t seem like the answer.

Could this instead be a function of Best Picture nominees hogging all the nominations? If you divided nominations evenly, the 107 slots in 2012 would mean each of the 38 nominated films receives 2.8 nominations, but that’s quite low for a Best Picture nominee and fairly high for films in the Foreign, Animated, and Documentary categories, which typically are only nominated in those categories. Let’s look at the nomination distribution by film for these two comparison years.

If you simplify that to how many nominations go to Best Pictures versus films not nominated for Best Picture, an even clearer pattern emerges:

The 2012 slate had nine fewer films nominated compared to 2016, and the extra six nominations claimed by the 2012 Best Picture nominees would seem to explain a lot of that gap. Films not nominated for Best Picture frequently only get one nomination, and if you look at the more detailed pie charts, you’ll see that, indeed, all six of those nominations fit into the category of movies that only garnered one each (23 in 2012 and 29 in 2016). In other words, Best Picture nominees in 2012 didn’t “take” nominations away from movies that would otherwise have had two or more noms; Best Picture nominees “took” nominations away from movies which then went completely unrecognized by the Academy. (Some great movies from that year with zero nominations: Holy Motors, Looper, Frances Ha, and Dredd.)

This is one reason why this disparity in nomination variety actually matters. The difference between one nomination and two nominations for a movie is fairly minimal, as is the difference between, say, nine and ten nominations for a Best Picture nominee (Spotlight in 2015 won the top prize with only six total nominations). But the difference for a movie between zero nominations and one nomination is everything–a film with one nomination is guaranteed a spot in the history books, while a film with zero risks being forgotten completely. The more films the Academy recognizes, the more films it saves from the trash heap for eternity–and the more movies it ultimately evangelizes right now, one of the few actual positive benefits of the entire awards process.

The explanation for some of the other “missing” films in the nomination slate might be more benign, because it could represent the Academy’s willingness to de-ghetto-ize some of its categories. As I said earlier, the Oscars tend not to nominate Foreign, Animated, and Documentary features outside of their respective categories; it’s rare to see any of them nominated for categories like Editing, Direction, or Score, and rarer still for any of them to get a Best Picture nomination. Yet the Academy is willing from time to time to recognize the intrinsic qualities of animated and (especially) foreign films even compared to English language, live action movies, and the resulting nominations may take up slots that would otherwise have gone to singletons.

This is particularly true because singletons, films nominated only once, are most often found in the acting categories (like Isabelle Huppert’s 2016 nod for Best Actress for her role in Elle), the Screenplay categories (the 2016 nomination for The Lobster for Best Original Screenplay), Best Original Song (the 2016 nominations for songs from the animated Trolls and the doc Jim: The James Foley Story), and some of the minor technical categories (Best Makeup and Hairstyling almost always features one or more singletons, and the same goes for Best Visual Effects). Sometimes these potential singleton slots are taken up by Best Picture nominees, like when musicals like La La Land or Les Miserables garner Best Song nominations, or when a biopic featuring a star physically transformed earns itself a Makeup nod (Darkest Hour‘s team won that category in 2017 for turning Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill). But other times it’s the Academy recognizing that cinematography knows no language, or that a great score can be even more vital to the success of an animated film. Let’s look at one more set of distributions from 2012 and 2016:

The 2012 results reflect the Foreign Language Film nominee Amour also being nominated for Best Picture, Director, Lead Actress, and Screenplay, four “extra” nominations. In 2016, there were only three extra nominations: A Man Called Ove for Best Makeup and Hairstyling, Moana for Best Song, and Kubo and the Two Strings for Best Visual Effects. These extra “Foreign/Animated/Documentary” nominations, or FAD noms, are an important part of this discussion. However, since Amour was a Best Picture nominee, they don’t actually explain any more of the nine “missing” nominated films from 2012. If Best Picture nominees account for six of the nine, what accounts for those other three?

Not the Best Director or Best Editing categories, both of which drew entirely from the Best Picture nominees in both years (as is generally common). The Score, Song, Costume, and Visual Effects categories were equally varied in both years. 2016 diversified away from Best Picture nominees compared to 2012 in the Production Design, Sound Editing, and Sound Mixing categories, in Makeup and Hairstyling, and in the acting categories (which featured four singletons in 2016 and only two in 2012). That’s all covered by that same six Best Picture-attributable missing films.

But one of those singleton acting noms in 2016 can be also attributed to the final source of limited Oscar nom variation, a clustering of nominations among non-Best Picture nominees that’s present in 2012 and lessened in 2016, as can extra singletons nominated in 2016 in the Screenplay and Cinematography categories.

Simply put, the remainder of the discrepancy between years is a matter of this clustering of nominations with films that got multiple nominations but not a Best Picture slot. In 2012, there were six of these multis collectively taking 19 nominations, with only two of those films earning two noms each. In 2016, there were nine of these multis collectively taking 19 nominations, with fully eight of those films earning exactly two noms each. With those 19 nominations less clustered in 2016, there was room for three more of the nine “missing” films from 2012.

In other words, of the nine additional nominees in 2016, six are the result of less Best Picture clustering compared to 2012, and three are the result of less non-Best Picture clustering. Another way to break down those nine is that three are new non-Best Picture multiple nominees, and six are new singletons. (In fact, 2016 had eight more singletons, but also two more FAD films with multiple nominations.)

To summarize:

2012’s Best Picture nominees had more total nominations than 2016’s;

2012 had fewer non-Best Picture nominees with multiple nominations than 2016;

2012 had a foreign language nominee garner four extra nominations, while 2016 had a foreign language film and two animated films garner one extra nomination each;

2012 nominated fewer different movies and, as a result, gave more accolades to the films it did recognize rather than recognizing more films in a smaller way.

Let’s see if these trends hold true for this year’s movies, nominated for the release year of 2018.

Already you can see a huge difference here. There are four fewer films with only one nomination than even in 2012! You can also see significant Best Picture clustering–in fact, 2018 manages to have almost the exact same proportion of Best Picture nominee nominations to non-Best Picture nominee nominations as 2016 despite having one fewer Best Picture nominee:

But this also means that some of the difference between a less varied year like 2018 and a more varied year like 2016 has to do with those 47 nominations for films that weren’t nominated for Best Picture.

Let’s take a quick look at the 2018 FAD noms, which as I’m sure you can guess will be off the charts:

Okay, so you can’t be “off the charts” on a pie chart. But look at those slices! Roma‘s whopping nine additional nominations, Cold War‘s two extra noms, Never Look Away‘s extra nom for Cinematography, and a nomination each for RBG (for Song) and Isle of Dogs (Score) show the Academy’s willingness to recognize films outside of their respective traditional categories (even if it did miss the boat on Spider-Verse ).

Finally, when it comes to those non-Best Picture nominated multiple nominees, we can see significant clustering, worse than 2012 even. This year there are 10 of these multis collectively taking 24 nominations. The result is that, not counting films nominated for Foreign, Animated, or Documentary, 2018 only has eight singletons, compared to nine in 2012 and 17 in 2016.

Let’s go back to our summary of the various trends and see how they explain 2018’s short, short list of nominated films:

Did 2018’s Best Picture nominees have more total nominations than 2016’s? No, but with one fewer nomination, that means increased clustering.

There were 10 fewer total films nominated in 2018 than in 2016. Some of those are the result of clustering in the Best Picture nominations–in 2018, Best Picture nominees earned an average of 7.4 nominations, while in 2016, Best Picture nominees earned an average of 6.6 nominations (in 2012, the average was 7.2 noms per).

Did 2018 have fewer non-Best Picture nominees with multiple nominations than 2016? No, but they took 5 more nominations.

Only four films in 2018 were nominated exactly twice, half as many as in 2016 (eight) and only two more than in 2012 (two). Lots of clustering around non-Best Picture nominees with three and four nominations each.

What about FAD noms? 2018 had its foreign nominees garner 11 extra nominations, with an animated film and a documentary garnering one extra nomination each.

Roma‘s 10 nominations actually tie the record for the most nominations ever received by a foreign film, with 2000’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Both are probably in part to be expected when a prominent director achieves Oscar success and later returns with a foreign language production–Ang Lee’s earlier film Sense and Sensibility got seven nominations, and Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity garnered 10.

Did 2018 nominate fewer different movies? Yes. And, as a result, did 2018 give more accolades to the films it did recognize rather than recognizing more films in smaller ways? Again, yes.

Again, 2018’s slate features only eight singletons nominated outside the FAD categories. I’m not arguing here whether or not any of these films deserve or don’t deserve these nominations on the merits. But I think my analysis makes it clear that there are even more films than usual on the outside looking in this year–films that now get neither the temporary boost in audience profile that a nomination would allow, nor that sure place in history an Oscar nom forever secures.

From smaller and more obscure movies to the popular and critically acclaimed–Blindspotting, Annihilation, Hereditary, Sorry to Bother You, Three Identical Strangers, Eighth Grade, The Death of Stalin, Suspiria, Paddington 2, Crazy Rich Asians, Mandy, and Burning, just to name a very few movies potentially deserving of even just one nomination, just a little bit of recognition… None of them are assured of expanding their audiences as time moves on, of finding their way to the next home video format, of maintaining availability as streaming platforms change and contracts end. Plenty of movies even now simply get left behind, forgotten by most, harder and harder to see, less and less discussed, less influential, less beneficial to their creators, to their viewers, to the art form itself. In 500 years when the oceans have boiled and the monuments of man crumbled to dust I’ll still be able to find out in less than 20 seconds that That Girl from Paris was nominated in 1936 for one category, Best Sound Recording, and be curious what it is, and find out that it still exists on VHS and can be watched for just the low, low price of $24.95 plus shipping and handling. That’s a movie I’ve never heard of before, but I know it exists today because it’s on the right list, even though that was 82 years ago.

The Academy has a responsibility to shine their spotlight on films that deserve to be seen and remembered, and the more films it can do that for, the better, even at the expense of giving yet another nomination to a heavily lauded Best Picture nominee. Maybe 2018 has fewer good films than other years and maybe it doesn’t; maybe the best films this year are just that much better, and in more ways, and maybe they’re not. This isn’t about that. The Academy should work harder from now on to spread the love, because that may be the only thing the Oscars are still good for. Let’s hope that, like 2012, 2018 is another outlier. There are plenty of people out there who, like me, try to watch the nominated movies every year. Frankly, it shouldn’t be this easy for us.

-Josh Kyu Saiewitz