5 of Best Picture Nominees Trend for the last 12 months • Black Swan (Light Blue) • The Fighter (Red) • Inception (Orange) • The Kids Are All Right (Green) • The King's Speech (Dark Blue) as shown by Google
Straight from the official Google blog comes an interesting post discussing the possibility of a correlation between Oscar wins and the public’s interest by search trends. Sifting through their search trends for the last 3 years, Google had found that there were consistent search patterns for each year’s Best Picture winners (2008’s No Country for Old Men, 2009’s Slumdog Millionaire and 2010’s The Hurt Locker). Using the data gathered, they determined that for each of those years’ Best Picture winners there “was an upward trend in search volume for at least four weeks, as well as highest regional interest from New York”.
Google attempts to present a similar pattern within this year’s nominees. On top of the trending nominees is The Social Network which spiked for five weeks while close behind, fellow favourites Black Swan and The King’s Speech, have trended upward for four weeks. Does it mean that the more interest and popularity generated by a film through these search trends could possibly reflect Academy voters decisions? Are the voters the ones that are Googling, thus contributing to these trends? It’s not an exact science (so no phone calls to any bookies after reading this) but it is an interesting view on such longstanding traditions. For more in depth examination into these and other search trends for this year’s Oscar nominees such as actor, director and cinematographer trends click over to the official Google Blog.