Every year, the entertainment press and viewers of the Academy Awards will inevitably call out one movie or the other for being “Oscar bait,” and then starts the cycle of think-pieces defining what exactly is an “Oscar-bait” role or movie.

People have their theories (does it pertain to Hollywood, itself, is it about the Holocaust, is it about Slavery, etcetera), but, as I will attempt to show you, the answer to “what is an Oscar-bait role or movie?” is, simply put, “a biopic.”

If you think about the last few years, you’ll immediately notice a pattern of biographical roles: Leonardo DiCaprio, Eddie Redmayne, Matthew McConaughey, Daniel-Day Lewis, all won Best Actor, all for portraying a historical figure. To find out just how common or uncommon this was, I looked at every Best Actor winner and nominee in the entire 88 years of the Academy Awards. Without getting into the details just yet, the number of biopic winners and nominees has exploded, starting 30 years ago, and it’s shown no signs of slowing down (except maybe this year).

While many people have noticed this recent influx of biopic roles getting nominated or winning at the Oscars, particularly in the Best Actor category, the common refrain is that “Biopics roles have been at the Oscars forever.” That is almost true. Biopics have been at the Oscars since the second Academy Awards when Emil Jannings was nominated for Best Actor for his role as Czar Paul I. A biopic role would win Best Actor the following year, when George Arliss won for his role as British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.

But, biopic roles would have a consistently low share of the winners and nominees throughout the first 60 years of the Academy Awards — usually zero, one or two nominees a year. That all changed, starting around the 59th Academy Awards. Broken down into five-year periods, you can see in the chart below that the period between the 59th and 63rd Academy Awards had seven Best Actor nominees for biopic roles, a number that has increased almost every subsequent five year period and doubled in the most recent five years at the Oscars.

That’s 14 Best Actor nominees in the last five years for biopic roles, making up the majority of the 25 total nominees in that time. The raw numbers, too, suggest an even greater explosion. In the entire history of the Academy Awards’ 432 Best Actor nominees, 105 of them have been for biopic roles. Fifty-eight of those nominees have come in the last 30 years, and 42 of those in the last 20 years.

Even in the most recent times, 12 of the last 15 nominees for Best Actor have been for biopic roles — that’s 80 percent for all you mathematicians out there.

And let’s not pretend that Actor’s aren’t tuned in to this trend. Just this year, it was revealed that Tom Hardy and Leonardo DiCaprio had a bet as to whether or not Hardy would get nominated for his role — a Supporting Actor role, but a biopic role nonetheless. Actors do know about this, and the strategy is clear: if you want an Oscar nomination, star in a biopic.

That has led to an influx of Oscar pretenders, with showy biopic roles such as last year’s Black Mass or The Walk, and this year’s Snowden and Bleed for This, to name just a few. Everyone wants a piece of that pie, because they want to sell it right back to the Academy, who eats that pie for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

But not only has the number of Best Actor nominees for biopics risen sharply, so to have the number of winners of the Best Actor award for biopic roles. In the same fashion, broken up into five-year periods, you’ll see the same pattern emerge in the chart below:

I had already discussed the four winners in the last 5 years, but you can see that number in context now as double that of any five-year period before the 74th Academy Awards ceremony. As you can see, the total number of winners of the Best Actor award for biopic roles is 25, but 10 of those have come in the last 15 years, a whopping, and I do mean whopping, 40 percent of the all-time total.

“Oscar bait,” in my mind, can only be defined by the type of role that most routinely gets Academy Awards attention, and there is no way you can break down the numbers to come up with a more convincing pattern than this: biopics are Oscar bait. It’s the simplest, most obvious answer, and it just so happens to be right.

Of course, the question that comes after any long, exhaustive research such as this is “so what?” Is the explosion of biopics as it relates to the success at the Academy Awards a bad thing? I argue yes, with what I feel is easy-to-follow logic. An Academy Award, and prestige in general, is a desirable attribute for any actor and movie studio. Therefore, studios who want awards are likely going to make movies that they think have the best shot at winning awards, and, hand-in-hand, actors will leap at the opportunity to star in those movies.

Since “those movies,” as we’ve established, are biopics, we’re going to see more of those movies and perhaps fewer movies about truly original and interesting characters. Even if we don’t see fewer movies about original characters, though, those original characters are going to be remembered less, since an Academy Award often boosts the box office and viewership of movies (see last year’s Spotlight).

For proof that biopics are the scourge of the film awards industry, I look no further than the 87th Academy Awards, where Eddie Redmayne won for playing Stephen Hawking over nominees Steve Carell, Bradley Cooper and Benedict Cumberbatch, who also starred in biopics for their nominated roles. Missing from these nominees were the characters I really latched onto that year, such as Jake Gyllenhaal’s portrayal of Lou Bloom in Nightcrawler, Ralph Fiennes as Gustave H in The Grand Budapest Hotel and Tom Hardy’s performance as Ivan Locke in Locke. I wasn’t alone in my praise of these roles, either. The 2014 Metacritic Awards Scorecard put Gyllenhaal and Fiennes in the top 5 in overall Best Actor prestige that year.

Metacritic’s 2014 Awards and Nominations Scorecard for Best Actor

But these performances have a much harder job grabbing attention as opposed to biopic roles. Biopic roles generally require some form of physical affectation and “transformation,” which, for whatever reason, piques the Academy’s interest. These are also roles that history has proven to be important, whereas other roles have to prove they are important and worthy of a movie.

While I’m tempted to doom and gloom that the rise of biopics at the Oscars will mean the death of memorable characters, such as Hannibal Lector and Daniel Plainview, to name a few, 2016 has miraculously given me a reason for optimism. Right now, there are only three real biopic contenders for Best Actor — Andrew Garfield in Hacksaw Ridge (coming off a SAG nomination), Joel Edgerton in Loving (currently #4 on Metacritic’s 2016 Scorecard) and Tom Hanks in Sully (because he’s Tom Hanks).

Every other role that was nominated for Best Actor at the Screen Actors Guild, which is usually a good Oscar-predictor, or that is making waves in other Awards circles for Best Actor, are original characters, such as Casey Affleck in Manchester by the Sea, Denzel Washington in Fences and Ryan Gosling in La La Land, and they are leading the pack by far, so much so that we could have a year where zero biopics are nominated for Best Actor, something that has only happened once in the past decade.

While history may prove this year to be a blip (like the 80th Academy Awards), or the Academy may very well turn around and nominate them anyway, this is an optimistic sign at quelling the explosion. Perhaps even the Academy as grown fatigued over the over-saturated biopic market. We’ll find out in a few short weeks.