Category Archives: Entertainment

More movies have Oscar appeal than can be nominated so many don’t get the Oscar money boost

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A forthcoming study in a premier sociology journal looks at the formula for Oscar nominees and how it affects the money they make:

So is it a good idea for movie makers to pursue Oscar nominations? Rossman and Schilke’s research suggests that it probably is not. Rossman and Schilke use data from the Internet Movie Database to identify the themes of a very large set of movies. They then look to see how well each movie’s themes match the themes of Oscar nominees in the five years before the movie was released, to figure out how well the movie matches the “Oscar formula,” while also accounting for other factors (e.g. the studio that released the movie) which could affect the movie’s Oscar chances. This allows them to figure out the ‘Oscar appeal’ of each movie in their dataset. On Rossman and Schilke’s measure, movies like The Hottie and the Nottie have very low Oscar appeal, while movies like Out of Africa have high appeal.

The problem is that there are lots of movies with Oscar appeal, but far fewer movies that get nominated. Because the Oscar nominee list imposes a sharp cutoff (movies either get nominated or they don’t), movies that just failed to make the Oscar nomination cut are likely to do far worse than movies that just about got on the list, even if the two are of more or less equal quality. The financial losses of the failures counterbalance the success of the nominees.

As Rossman and Schilke conclude:

..net of achieving Oscar nominations, Oscar appeal has a negative effect on financial returns. In essence, there are two types of high Oscar appeal movies—those that do not receive nominations (and tend to lose money) and those that do receive nominations (and tend to make money)—but taken together these two types of movies are no more nor less profitable than movies with low Oscar appeal.

This seems to fit other evidence that it is very difficult to predict which mass culture products will be successful – whether movies, music, or books – and the more successful ones can make enough to offset the losses from producing all the rest.

Linking the Ace Hardware home and Wisteria Lane

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Following up on a post regarding an odd-looking home in recent Ace Hardware commercials and a comment on the post that the Ace home was located on Wisteria Lane in the TV show Desperate Housewives, here is another look at the home courtesy of Wikipedia:

File:KathrynsHouse.JPG

While the Ace commercial made the house gave the house even more odd proportions in order to fit an Ace sign on the front, the house is still odd. Too many gables that stick out too far plus a really odd second story window that barely fits between the two gables.

Here is more about Wisteria Lane:

In preparing for the pilot, the Desperate Housewives production team searched a 30-minute radius of Hollywood for a suburb in which to film the show, but nothing was quite right. The production team initially looked into purchasing a block of actual houses for filming, however they felt the houses looked too similar and lacked character. So they went with Plan B – a studio backlot.

Only two studios in Hollywood have significant backlots, Warner Brothers and Universal. Warner Brothers had half a street, with houses on one side and a park on the other, but there was no sense of community, but Universal had Colonial Street – a collection of rundown house fronts that lined both sides of the street, and were close enough together to look good on camera.

The only problem was that the houses are only three-quarter scale. The team had to deal with the challenges of the unnatural – the houses being too small and too close and the sidewalks not as wide as the real thing, but the show is a parable and a slightly less-than-real look became an advantage, and added to the suburban perfection on film…

At first, the houses were just facades, with interiors built on a sound stage, but once Housewives was picked up, something unique was done for the show, interiors were created, including Susan’s kitchen and Mary Alice’s living room, and Gabrielle could go in the front door and into the main floor of her house. This created a unique filming style which allowed viewers to watch a scene inside a house and look out through the windows into the street – creating a real sense of community.

To help audiences identify the different characters quickly, the team devised a colour palette system based on the characters personality and traits. They looked for colours that were intriguing, and then matched them up, these colour palettes are carried out in each character’s house exterior and interior. For example Gabrielle Solis was set with warm orange-yellow tones to hint at her spicy Latino nature. Whereas Susan Mayer’s character has more feminine sensibilities, demonstrated by the use of pastel colours.

So perhaps the real problem with the poorly proportioned house was that it was a 3/4 scale. Still, even a full scale version of the house might look at little busy in the front.

Analyzing Netflix’s thousands of movie genres

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Alexis Madrigal decided to look into the movie genres of Netflix – and found lots of interesting data:

As the hours ticked by, the Netflix grammar—how it pieced together the words to form comprehensible genres—began to become apparent as well.

If a movie was both romantic and Oscar-winning, Oscar-winning always went to the left: Oscar-winning Romantic Dramas. Time periods always went at the end of the genre: Oscar-winning Romantic Dramas from the 1950s…

In fact, there was a hierarchy for each category of descriptor. Generally speaking, a genre would be formed out of a subset of these components:

Region + Adjectives + Noun Genre + Based On… + Set In… + From the… + About… + For Age X to Y

Yellin said that the genres were limited by three main factors: 1) they only want to display 50 characters for various UI reasons, which eliminates most long genres; 2) there had to be a “critical mass” of content that fit the description of the genre, at least in Netflix’s extended DVD catalog; and 3) they only wanted genres that made syntactic sense.

And the conclusion is that there are so many genres that they don’t necessarily make sense to humans. This strikes me as a uniquely modern problem: we know how to find patterns via algorithm and then we have to decide whether we want to know why the patterns exist. We might call this the Freakonomics problem: we can collect reams of data, data mine it, and then have to develop explanations. This, of course, is the reverse of the typical scientific process that starts with theories and then goes about testing them. The Netflix “reverse engineering” can be quite useful but wouldn’t it be nice to know why Perry Mason and a few other less celebrated actors show up so often?

At the least, I bet Hollywood would like access to such explanations. This also reminds me of the Music Genome Project that underlies Pandora. Unlock the genres and there is money to be made.

Chicago suburb and school district won’t allow MTV’s “16 and Pregnant” to film on their property

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Not all suburbs want to appear on reality TV shows: the Chicago suburb of Tinley Park and the local school district don’t want MTV’s “16 and Pregnant” to film there.

MTV’s controversial show “16 and Pregnant” is unwelcome in Tinley Park, as village officials and school leaders have pushed back against possible filming in the community.

When Tinley Park Mayor Ed Zabrocki heard the show might be shooting at the 80th Avenue train station’s restaurant, he sent word to the owner of Parmesans Station that the show’s cameras would be unwelcome on Tinley property…

Officials at Andrew High School declined this summer to allow MTV’s cameras on campus, principal Bob Nolting said…

When he was approached about filming at his restaurant, Papandrea said he had the same initial reaction as Zabrocki.

But he changed his mind after giving the matter further consideration, reasoning that the show has a positive effect on teenage pregnancies, he said…

For Zabrocki, who worked for many years as a guidance counselor at Brother Rice High School, the show presents “a bad image.”

Suburbs are often conscious about their image and it sounds like the suburb and school district didn’t want to be viewed as promoting teen pregnancy. Instead, I’m sure they would rather their community and schools are viewed as having a good quality of life, meaning they are the sort of places where teen girls don’t get pregnant. Of course, not all teen pregnancies happen to low-income residents but that seems to be the perception that Tinley Park does not want to invite.

Infographic: “Gender Inequality in [Hollywood] Film”

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Check out this infographic from the New York Film Academy on gender inequality in American films. A few of the facts involved:

-“Women purchase half of the movie tickets sold in the U.S.” but “28.8% of women wore sexually revealing clothes as opposed to 7.0% of men” in the top 500 films from 2007 to 20012 and the “average ratio of male actors to females is 2.25:1” in these same films.

-The number of men and women working behind the scene in major roles of the top 250 films of 2012 is pretty unequal: women are 9% of directors, 15% of writers, 17% of executive producers, 25% of producers, 20% of editors, and 2% of cinematographers.

-“Forbes 2013 list of the top ten highest paid actresses made a collective $181 million versus $465 million made by the top ten male actors” and “In 2013 the highest paid female actor, Angelina Jolie, made $33 million, roughly the same amount as the two lowest-ranked men. Furthermore, age appears to be a dominant factor in an actress’s monetary success compared to men.”

So much for progressive Hollywood? The infographic also suggests the depth of the inequality goes beyond just star actors and actresses; it applies to numerous important roles and how characters are regularly portrayed.

Another aspect of this is to think about using infographics for social activism. In one big graphic, this group has presented a lot of data regarding gender in American films. Is it more effective to present the data in (1) a splashy way – infographics are hot these days and (2) to overwhelm people with data?

Sociological musings about American culture in “It’s A Wonderful Life”

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This talk by a sociologist about It’s A Wonderful Life serves as a reminder that the film provides a nice window into modern American life. Although it is a holiday movie, here are a few sociological ideas that still resonate today:

1. Mr. Potter is the evil banker and the primary villain. While hero George Bailey just wants to help his family and others in the community, the banker only cares about money. Could be connected to discussions of inequality, the wealth of bankers, and the role of the finance industry in helping to build communities.

2. Hero George Bailey wants to build suburban-like homes in a new subdivision in his community. The movie came out at the beginning of the post-World War II suburban boom and anticipates that many Americans simply want a home of their own.

3. The movie is set in a relatively small town where George Bailey and his family can know lots of people. Even as Americans look to private single-family homes, there is still often a small-town ideal where everyone gets along and helps each other (and often the assumption that we have lost this over time).

4. George Bailey seeks meaning in his work and life. When he doesn’t find it, he considers suicide. Bailey wants to provide for his family and friends and struggles when he cannot do this.

5. George’s life is saved by an angel. Americans tend to like angels even as more Americans say they are not religious. Angels fit with a spirituality where God generally wants people to succeed.

6. The celebratory ending of the film comes as George is surrounded by his family and friends. The emphasis on family life is not unusual in American stories but this also highlights the small town coming together. Bailey has the American Dream at the end: a home, a loving family, helpful friends, and is optimistic about his future.

Of course, this film has been analyzed plenty as a classic sitting at #20 on the AFI’s top 100 movies. Yet, it is an important moment as America started seeing itself as the prosperous superpower.

Music has gotten louder not to drive sales but because artists want it that way

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Recorded music today tends to be loud – and this is what many artists want:

The problem with Katz’s pronouncement, though, is that the market doesn’t incentivize loudness in the first place. Studies have shown that there is no correlation between volume and sales. Broadcast radio, where the competition for loudness might be most fierce, already clips the audio waveform at a certain level to avoid conflicts with advertisements and speech. Many cloud music services like Rdio and Spotify already have volume adjustment logic built in with no noticeable effect on recording trends. Low-fidelity loudness has succeeded and survived for some time without much outcry from the public, just from the small population of audiophiles and sound engineers.

The truth is that artists and engineers make their music loud because they want to. And the desire to do so usually correlates more with trends in technology than with commercial concerns. From gramophones to electric playback of records and digital technology, a series of short-lived fads have sprung up wherein musicians abuse new listening mediums to make their songs as loud as possible to the detriment of fidelity. In a paper for the journal Popular Music, Kyle Devine reviewed the long history of feuds over formats and electrical amplification for attention:

The history of sound reproduction can be understood as a history in which auditory ideals and practicalities are in constant negotiation, where the priorities of audiences and “audiophiles” drift in and out of synch…

And something similar is happening now in pop music as more songs that aren’t in the vein of screaming punk choruses make their way onto the charts. While not high fidelity, groups like Adele and Mumford & Sons are easing away from the volume ceiling with moments of quiet that are actually, technically, quiet.

We’ll see what happens in the latest installment of the loudness wars. There appears to be an interesting interplay between what is possible technologically, what artists want to try (and this varies quite a bit by genre), and what the public wants to listen to. From a production perspective in the sociology of culture, technology is the important part because that is what drives tastes. Flip the question around and we could ask whether punk rock would have emerged as it did without the technological ability to simply play loud.

I wonder if another reason is the uptick in headphone/earbud usage throughout the day which really began in force during the 1980s with the Walkman which was followed by the Discman which was followed by mp3 players/phones. While walking around and with lower quality headphones, particularly ones that don’t block out other noise or cover the whole ear, quiet songs are difficult to hear.

Ten enviable, but not necessarily realistic, TV homes

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Take a closer look at the sometimes ridiculous dwelling places of ten well-known television shows.

There are few things quite as frustrating for those bunked away in crappy, overpriced rentals as watching sitcom characters putter around in homes that—in real life—would be astronomically expensive even with a steady income (which television characters often mysteriously lack.) Whether it be the NYC-based Friends apartment or the California-cool New Girl loft that’s causing a big dose of sitcom real estate envy, do have a look at some of television’s most enviable living situations—presented below in order of least to most realistic.

The Cosby Show and Big Bang Theory take the honors as the most realistic. Even as the average new American home has increased over the decades, might TV homes have increased even more?

As this is not the first article I have seen on this topic in recent months, I wonder what the outcomes of such analyses. One way to go would be to get into a discussion of how realistic TV shows should be. How much should television portray real circumstances of Americans who as a whole have a median household income around $50,000? In order to be good shows, do they have to present something close to reality? Or, do Americans prefer entertainment that is more aspirational? Perhaps there are audiences for both though the general trend seems to be that fans are not very worried about whether the homes are realistic.

A more interesting route would be to consider what effect these depictions of homes have on viewers. As sociologist Juliet Schor argues, does this give viewers a different reference group? Schor suggests when Americans see “normal” TV life – which, in reality, it typically upper class life even when the characters are supposed to be middle or working-class – they readjust their own consumption patterns to match those on TV. So, if viewers of Sex and the City see single women in New York enjoying rather large apartments, they then expect to find such places for themselves and might be beyond their means to make it happen.

Country music, social class, and rural areas

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Here is a discussion of how country music talks about social class, particularly lower classes, in small towns and rural areas:

It didn’t seem out of place to embrace a simpler life when all it meant was going without a few new dresses or sharp ties. In Garth Brooks’s 1990 song, “Friends in Low Places,” Brooks sings “Blame it all on my roots, I showed up in boots, and ruined your black-tie affair,” as he addresses his ex. He is dressed inappropriately for a formal event and uses bad manners; unlike Hank Williams, who sang of his ragged boots as a point of frustration, Brooks revels in being rough around the edges, even if he is poking fun at himself. Similarly, in “Redneck Woman,” released in 2004, Gretchen Wilson sings that she can wear WalMart clothes half-price because she doesn’t need “designer tags to make my man want me.” She frames it as a choice. It’s not that she can’t afford champagne; she prefers beer…

But when being rural and low-income starts to mean that you’re living without heat or that you’re struggling to pay for your own groceries, these songs begin to sound bittersweet rather than celebratory. It’s tempting to play a “happy warrior,” especially when much of American culture frowns upon people who acknowledge any sort of victimhood. (After all, notions that the poor are poor because they’re lazy still persist in much of America.) But it’s hard to ignore some of the harsh realities of rural life in America today, and Musgraves and Clark in particular have taken the issue head-on. “Merry Go ‘Round” and “Pray to Jesus,” two songs eerily similar to each other in both melody and lyrics, don’t try to sidestep the dreary reality that can be a small-town or low-income life…

Clark and Musgraves’s songs, though, embody a state of mind country music needs to acknowledge more often. People love country music, in part, because it speaks to the heart of rural existence, a way of life that many people find happiness in and a culture that seems more authentic.

Yet, like all real cultures, rural life has its shortcomings. People become bored in a way that is distinct to an isolation of place. Rural boredom is different from urban boredom: Much of the appeal of cities is rooted in the excitement of newness, of novelty, so urban boredom is a result of being surrounded by stimulation yet still feeling alone. Rural boredom, by contrast, is often exacerbated by the tendency to wonder what you’re missing out on. It comes from wondering if there is more to life than a familiar community (like the one Miranda Lambert sings of) and the limited romantic possibilities and career options a small town offers. Musgraves, Clark, and Monroe capture that suffocation perfectly, and more artists should take their lead in being honest about the limitations of small-town life. Because sometimes, even country music’s unsinkable happy-warrior protagonist needs to reflect.

See this post from a few years ago discussing a similar argument. It would be interesting to try to trace the link between talking about social class and rural areas with the movement of country music toward pop/rock music and mainstream American culture. How much does the textual content change over the years? It is one thing to talk about a few artists who might be bucking a trend but a more rigorous analysis could reveal something interesting. Additionally, it seems that all of this could be linked to the decline of many rural areas in the United States. Even as Americans often hold romantic ideals about small-town life, America is now a suburban country and has been for decades. How much can you sing to an audience that increasingly is more familiar with strip malls, lifestyle centers, and big single-family homes about the difficulties of rural life?

At the same time, such songs could bring attention to areas in the United States that don’t get much attention otherwise.

The Simpsons slips in a math lesson now and then – and it probably doesn’t change much

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Check out this listing of The Simpsons episodes that feature math lessons. Having seen some of these episodes, I remember a few of these moments quite clearly. Yet, while it is clever that the writers dropped these in, how many of the viewers noticed? We could use these examples as a sign that The Simpsons is an erudite show, one often derided as an animated comedy with little redeeming value that typically punches above its weight in terms of cultural references and ideas. But, if the viewers don’t notice or care, what is the point (beyond making some critics happy)?

It sounds like we need an experiment where viewers are asked to watch these episodes and see if they spot these math moments. Or, we might set something up to see whether viewers of these episodes, compared to viewers of other episodes, learned something more. The answer, I suspect, is that including the math doesn’t change most viewers.