Proof That Release Dates Really Do Affect the Oscars

A map of the monthly calendar of Academy Award winners and nominees has surprising results: December is the most popular month for nominated releases, but winners tend to come from October and November.

There has long been a debate in Hollywood: the later the movie, the higher the award chances. More recently, a shift in the Oscar schedule has added a new wrinkle: perhaps there's such a thing as too late of a release date. Now comes a project from the Dutch news website NU.nl (via the Guardian), mapping out the monthly calendar of Academy Award winners (below in red) and nominees (in blue). And the results are surprising: December is the most popular month for nominated releases — as evidenced by our busy holiday movie season — but winners tend to come from October and November.

You can click over to either site to scroll over and see dot represents each film, but the newer argument may seem to hold up: December releases might no longer give voters enough time to see the late entries. And if that's too much of a conspiracy theory for you, at least note that July has never produced a Best Picture-winning film:

The project also explores the time span between a release date and the Oscar ceremony itself, including how that's changed over the years from the early days of Oscar, when films nominated were released over a year before the ceremony.