A quick experiment with data visualization for Academy Award-winning features. The goal was to evaluate the 2013 nominees against previous Best Picture winners and see how they compare (to give me a clue which one to bet on)
I looked at budget, time period, genre, and total number of Oscar nominations for each film (caveat: wasn't sure what time period to classify Return of the King).
Interestingly, the 2013 winner (Argo) does seem to fall nicely in the budget/time period cluster of previous winners.
I did all of this manually in Illustrator, and I didn't get to include as much data as I would have liked. It would be interesting to redo this chart and include all the nominees for Best Picture from 1985 - 2015, rather than just the Best Picture winners. Possibly notate the actual winners with a certain color border. I'd need to account for budget inflation as well...
Next project: write a script to collect relevant data from movie databases and automate the graphing.