Academy nominees are not getting box-office boost

In this file film publicity image released by Summit Entertainment, Jeremy Renner, left, and Anthony Mackie are shown in a scene from, "The Hurt Locker."

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences doubled the number of nominees this year in hopes of drawing more attention to more movies. But the revenue bump for this year's crop is less than the one enjoyed by last year's five best-picture hopefuls.

And of that $135 million, all but about $24 million went to the one film in least need of an Oscar bump: the record-smashing Avatar. The figures were generated between the nominations February 2 and the last weekend before Sunday's awards.

Last year's best picture nominees pulled in $146 million over a comparable period, and most of that went to a film Oscar helped turn into a sensation: Slumdog Millionaire. Three of the five 2009 nominees at least doubled their take in that period, something no film in this year's batch even came close to doing.

"The bottom line is adding five more movies didn't necessarily add two times the gross to the crop of films," said Paul Dergarabedian, box office president for industry tracker Hollywood.com.

One possible explanation is that a best-picture nod may be less valuable now with more films getting one, but several other factors lessened the honor's financial impact.

The awards ceremony this year is two weeks later, March 7 vs. February 22 last year, so that the show wouldn't compete with the Olympics, and the nominations came two weeks later as well. Generally, the longer a movie is in theaters, the less it brings in each week.

Snowstorms along the East Coast also appeared to dampen enthusiasm to see Oscar-nominated films, said Bruce Goerlich, chief research officer for market researcher Rentrak Corp.

In addition, five of this year's nominees weren't even in theaters by the time they were nominated: front-runner The Hurt Locker, A Serious Man, Inglourious Basterds, Up and District 9. Last year, all five best picture contenders were still in theaters when nominations were announced.

Up was released so long ago it has been out on DVD for 3½ months. The Hurt Locker did return to the big screen, but only in about 100 theaters nationwide.

"It used to be for years, the (nominated) pictures would be re-released at Oscar time," said Tom Sherak, president of the Academy. "But it's not viable to do that any more, so most studios don't."

Sherak believes expanding the category to 10 has been successful because it means more people have seen the nominated films and are likely to be interested in Sunday's broadcast.