CAYOM 3.0 - Oscar Records

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Franchises list also updated

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SOME CRITICAL CONSENSUS STATS:

 

YEAR 1

 

• Most Points Without appearing in a Top 5: The Curse of Monkey Island
• Least Points While appearing in a Top 5: SOMA
• Most Points for an Animation: Me and My Shadow
• Most Points for a (non-animated) Blockbuster: Spark: Rising 
• Most Points for a Horror: The SCP Foundation
• Most Points for a (non-animated) Comedy: Blood and Fur
• Percentage of Points the #1 Film received: 80% (200/250 Flowers for Algernon) 

YEAR 2

 

• Most Points Without appearing in a Top 5: Midnight in the Afghan Valley
• Least Points While appearing in a Top 5: The Amityville Nightmare
• Most Points for an Animation: To the Moon
• Most Points for a (non-animated) Blockbuster: War of the Gods
• Most Points for a Horror: The Terrible Plight of Freddy Zapper
• Most Points for a (non-animated) Comedy: Blank
• Percentage of Points the #1 Film received: 91% (182/200 And the Band Played On) 

YEAR 3

• Most Points Without appearing in a Top 5: Student Film
• Least Points While appearing in a Top 5: Fatal Rendezvous
• Most Points for an Animation: The Number One Dime
• Most Points for a (non-animated) Blockbuster: The Odyssey: Counsel of the Dead
• Most Points for a Horror: The Chrysalids
• Most Points for a (non-animated) Comedy: Blood and Fur: Inglourious Paw-Stards
• Percentage of Points the #1 Film received: 93.5% (187/200 Notes from the Otherspace

YEAR 4

 

• Most Points Without appearing in a Top 5: Starlit Highway
• Least Points While appearing in a Top 5: Kingdom of the Son
• Most Points for an Animation: Can You Imagine?
• Most Points for a (non-animated) Blockbuster: The Odyssey: Homecoming
• Most Points for a Horror: Silent Hill: Restless Dreams
• Most Points for a (non-animated) Comedy: By the Balls
• Percentage of Points the #1 Film received: 96.4% (241/250 The Odyssey: Homecoming) 

YEAR 5

 

• Most Points Without appearing in a Top 5: Sylvarius
• Least Points While appearing in a Top 5: Green Lantern Corps: Rise of the Manhunters
• Most Points for an Animation: Two Lonely Bounty Hunters
• Most Points for a (non-animated) Blockbuster: The Scavenger Wars Part II
• Most Points for a Horror: O, Maestro!
• Most Points for a (non-animated) Comedy: One Punch Man
• Percentage of Points the #1 Film received: 92.9% (209/225 24 Hours) 

YEAR 6

• Most Points Without appearing in a Top 5: Pokémon: The Cinnabar Conspiracy
• Least Points While appearing in a Top 5: XJ-9: Rebirth
• Most Points for an Animation: Gateways
• Most Points for a (non-animated) Blockbuster: Spark: A Hero's Promise
• Most Points for a Horror: Voicemail
• Most Points for a (non-animated) Comedy: Plus One
• Percentage of Points the #1 Film received: 91.2% (228/250 Paradise Island) 

YEAR 7

• Most Points Without appearing in a Top 5: Pillars of Eternity: An Ancient Legacy
• Least Points While appearing in a Top 5: Tongues
• Most Points for an Animation: Laika
• Most Points for a (non-animated) Blockbuster: The Scavenger Wars Part III
• Most Points for a Horror: Attack on Titan
• Most Points for a (non-animated) Comedy: Scooby-Doo: Cult of the Creeper
• Percentage of Points the #1 Film received: 79.3% (238/300 Laika) 

YEAR 8

 

• Most Points Without appearing in a Top 5: Endless Animation's The Un-title-able Squirrel Girl Sequel
• Least Points While appearing in a Top 5: Returning from Hell
• Most Points for an Animation: Everything We Miss
• Most Points for a (non-animated) Blockbuster: Olive's Hallowed Eve 
• Most Points for a Horror: Heartman
• Most Points for a (non-animated) Comedy: Strangers in the Town
• Percentage of Points the #1 Film received: 89.8% (247/275 The Bronx is Burning)

Edited August 27, 2021 by Blankments

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Updated all my posts bro

Edited August 27, 2021 by Blankments

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First post and the adapted screenplay spreadsheet have been updated

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First post and franchises list have been updated

Edited September 11, 2021 by cookie

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Gender Diversity in the Voice Acting Categories: An Examination

 

In this two-part series, I will shed some light on the gender diversity in the only two acting categories in CAYOM that have male and female performers share the same ballot, i.e the Best Voice Actor/Actress in a Lead or Supporting Role categories. This is not intended as a commentary on individual performances, but rather as an overlook of ongoing trends in CAYOM voting when it comes to gender-neutral categories. Expect a similar examination to be made to directors in the future.

 

Part 1 - Nominees

 

Lead Performance

 

Somewhat surprisingly, Lead Performance has close to a gender equilibrium when it comes to nominees, as seen in this pie chart:

 

However, this was not always the case. Starting in Year 1, there was only one female nominee in the lead category, but thanks to a steady increase in the number of female nominees over time, combined with a massive leap in Year 5 thanks to the first ever all-female ballot, that gap has been closed, and the chart is now slightly trending in favor of female nominees. Should it continue at a rate of three female nominees per year, as seen in the last three years, they will have a 55% share by Year 12.

 

When it comes to multi-nominees, i.e actors/actresses that have been nominated more than once, not necessarily for the same role, those are:

• Millie Bobby Brown as Emily Charnon (female)
• David Tennant as Scrooge McDuck (male)
• Sophia Lillis as Cassie (female)
• Letitia Wright as Tamara (female)
• Olivia Cooke as Xevarre / Ashley (female)
• Anna Kendrick as Doreen Green (female)
• Zendaya as Olive (female)

This niche category is largely female-dominated, which makes sense, seeing how all but Cooke are nominated for the same role in two installments of the same series of films. Cooke was nominated once for Spark: A Hero's Promise and once for Toons v Reality, two unrelated features, hence the split in names.

 

A large part of why female nominees have steadily increased is CAYOM's surging drive to fill animated/motion-capture based franchise films with female protagonists, as the list above demonstrates. Can You Imagine?'s Jennifer Anderson, The Scavenger Wars's Tamara, Bounty Hamster's Cassie, Gateways's Bailee, Squirrel Girl's Doreen Green, Olive the Other Reindeer and Hilda's titular protagonists, etc. all make up a strong pantheon of female leads. Conversely, major franchises that employ animated/motion-capture male leads are becoming increasingly rare, at least among those that gain significant enough traction to get Oscar attention. One-off ventures such as New Tricks and The Ends of the Universe are more likely to have male leads in them.

 

 

Supporting Performance

 

The supporting category, however... woof, this one is rough.

 

As demonstrated with the pie chart above, males take up a much more significant share of nominees than females. It has largely stayed that way since Year 3, as demonstrated with the chart below:

 

The growth rate for female nominees in the Supporting category has stagnated since Y4, and if anything their share has slightly decreased since then (30% in Year 4 versus 27.5% in Year 8). While the percentage has been up and down since Year 5, which saw an all-male ballot significantly skewing the chart in their favor, it still represents an average decline of 8.3% in share. Were the category to continue with a three male, two female split every year from now on, males would still have a 70% dominance by Year 10.

 

This is not to diminish or take away from acclaimed male vocal/motion-capture performances such as Dave Bautista in Can You Imagine?, Ben Foster in the Scavenger Wars films, or Michael Sheen in Laika, but it does highlight the propensity for voters to gravitate towards male roles in the supporting category. As late as Year 7, for instance, only one of the Supporting nominees was female (Sasha Lane in The Scavenger Wars Part III).

 

Multi-nominees are fewer than in Lead Performance, although this is partially due to Olivia Cooke graduating from a Supporting to a Lead role in the Spark series between its third and fourth installment. These are:

• Keith Ferguson as Flintheart Glomgold (male)
• Sam Rockwell as Leon Redbeard (male)
• Zoe Saldana as Dr. Neil Rosalene / Rita Sanchez (female)
• Ben Foster as Jarek (male)

This is also in part because Lead and Supporting roles are not created equal. Supporting roles are less likely to carry over between films in a specific series, in particular villain roles that take up a plurality of the Supporting category — 13 out of the 40 nominees are the antagonists in their respective films. It should be noted, however, that only two of these are female (Cate Blanchett's Magica de Spell in The Number One Dime and Olivia Cooke's Xevarre in Spark: Beyond the Sky), and they only take up about 18% of all female nominees, versus male villains taking up 38% of all male nominees.

 

An increased focus on female characters that play major supporting roles, villainous or not, would be a step towards closing the current gap. This examination is not meant to advocate that voters employ an unfair bias towards more female nominees going forward, but rather that the CAYOM industry as a whole could improve when it comes to female roles in animated/motion-capture based films that are not protagonists. Even in female-led series such as The Scavenger Wars and Olive the Other Reindeer, the supporting characters that gain significant traction tend to be male — though in the case of both of the series just mentioned, this is improving.

 

Due to the significant length of this post, winners will be discussed in the next part.

Edited September 18, 2021 by cookie

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Part 2 - Winners

 

Winners are lower in quantity than nominees, obviously, so we need to alter our approach from the previous topic. The winners are also decided by all voters collectively ranking five or sometimes more choices, rather than nominees happening through the five actors/actresses receiving the most individual endorsements. The share of nominees also play a factor in how likely it is for an actor or actress to win the award, as it would obviously be impossible for an actress to win in an all-male ballot, or vice versa.

 

Lead Performance

 

Top: Y1's Millie Bobby Brown, Y2's Charlie Day, Y3's David Tennant and Letitia Wright, and Y4's Alison Brie

Bottom: Y5's Anna Kendrick, Y6's Mckenna Grace, Y7's Carey Mulligan, and Y8's Zendaya

 

Thanks to a tie between The Number One Dime's David Tennant and The Scavenger Wars's Letitia Wright, the Lead category actually has nine winners. Removing the tie and giving the award to either Wright or Tennant wouldn't change the overall picture of women leads having a staggering dominance among winners, but it would be the difference between a puny 12.5% share for male leads and a less embarrassing 25% share. As it stands, male leads have a 22% share.

 

Small sample sizes are going to heavily skew results, but the fact that there hasn't been a male winner since Year 3 shows the industry's continuing trend to gravitate towards vocal and motion capture-based female leads, particularly in large-scale productions. Looking at the winners, all but Laika's Carey Mulligan are leads in popular blockbuster films, five of which grossed over $300 million at the domestic box office as of this writing. Their respective films receiving awards attention elsewhere do play a significant role still, with only Olive's Hallowed Eve's Zendaya starring in a film that wasn't nominated for either Best Picture or Best Animated Feature, though Olive did receive an Ensemble nomination.

 

Is it fair to say, in that case, that box office popularity and further awards attention are bound to influence who wins the awards? Possibly, but it's not like the quality of a Lead performance and a film's box office popularity and critical acclaim exist in completely separate vacuums, nor has the acclaim of a film always led to the lead roles getting nominations and wins (see Our City). All of the roles listed have themselves been praised, and Amulet's Millie Bobby Brown, Bounty Hamster's Charlie Day, and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl's Anna Kendrick all starred in animated films that didn't go on to win Best Animated Feature that year, anyhow.

 

 

Supporting Performance

 

Top: Y1's Will Arnett, Y2's Ice Cube, Y3's Cate Blanchett, Y4's Dave Bautista, and Y5's Daniel Craig

Bottom: Y5's Ben Foster, Y6's Donald Glover, Y7's Michael Sheen, and Y8's Imogen Poots

 

The Supporting Voice winners paint a picture that's much closer to that we saw of all the nominees in that category, i.e. it's abundantly male. Women have a 22% share among winners compared to 27.5% among all nominees, but it's a much smaller simple size, so to say it implies a further slight bias towards male performances would be disingenuous.

 

Much like Lead, Supporting has nine winners thanks to a tie, this time in Year 5 between Bambi: A Life in the Woods's Daniel Craig and The Scavenger Wars Part II's Ben Foster. Were we to remove the tie and give it to either performance, seeing how they're both male, female winners would actually land above that of the nominees at 33% — but again, it's a very small sample size. The average between the two shares, tie included or not, is rounded to 27.5% anyhow, so it's fair to say that the winners are almost a split image in gender diversity compared to all nominees.

 

Looking beyond gender, Supporting winners appear to very much be determined by whether the films they appear in receive major awards attention elsewhere, even more so than lead. All winners had their films be nominated for either Best Picture or Best Animated Feature, and only Bounty Hamster's Ice Cube had his animated film not win the Animated Feature award. Craig and Foster are the only two performances from live-action films (as ambiguous as Bambi's definition of being a "live-action" film is), but both Scavenger Wars Part II and Bambi were nominated in all the "elite four" categories (Picture, Director, Ensemble, and Screenplay), the former winning Ensemble.

 

To briefly touch on the villain discussion in the last post, the share of Supporting winners being the films' antagonists is at 44%* — Will Arnett's Shadow Hale, Cate Blanchett's Magica de Spell, Ben Foster's Jarek, and Michael Sheen's Sergei Korolev making up the count. That's a larger share than with all of the nominees, but it closely matches the 50% share antagonist roles have among Best Supporting Actor winners. Blanchett, however, is the only female villain to have won any acting award in CAYOM thus far.

 

* Ice Cube's Captain Fab is initially set up as an antagonist, but doesn't end up as one in the story proper.

 

 

Bonus: Racial diversity

 

Curiously, only two winners in each voice category are persons of color, and both are of the dominant gender in that category (female in lead, male in supporting). While this examination is about gender diversity as opposed to racial, it would be of interest to go back and match this with the racial markup of all nominees and see if any other biases are involved:

 

Neither set of pie charts paint a pretty picture in terms of racial diversity, but the surprising aspect here is that while the Supporting category far trails the Lead category in gender diversity, it has a significant leg up on racial diversity, at least when it comes to overall nominees. Lead nominees, in actuality, is even further behind in racial diversity than the winners, and that's with a much larger sample size.

 

As said in the first part of the examination, this is not to diminish or take away from the quality of individual performances, or suggest that non-white performances are being deliberately excluded in the voice categories in favor of white ones. It could be the symptom of a larger diversity issue in CAYOM in general, and the only way seemingly feasible to test that, given the scope of the task of going through the racial markup of every cast in every CAYOM film ever made would be, is to compare to the racial markup in the acting categories featuring live actors:

 

In order to match the gender-neutral nature of the voice categories, male and female nominees have been combined. These pie charts show that racial diversity is indeed an issue in general, and that the larger share of POC nominees in the Supporting voice category is an anomaly statistically.

 

As to why this is? That's difficult to determine. Out of the 13 POC nominees in the Supporting voice category, only two — Keith Ferguson as Flintheart Glomgold in The Adventures of Scrooge McDuck and Giancarlo Esposito as Saren in Mass Effect: Revelation — can be considered antagonists, so there's overall a low preference for putting people of color in villain roles (Ferguson is also nominated for the same performance in The Number One Dime. However, Glomgold is not considered an antagonist in that film) and instead in roles that end up helping the protagonist in some capacity, which is a bit less prevalent among nominees of all ethnicity groups.

 

So the takeaway here is the same as with the gender diversity analysis: CAYOM should strive for more roles for people of color, and that goes for all categories, voice, motion-capture, or live acting, but obviously the current situation shouldn't be remedied through unfair voting bias. This does seem to have been slowly improving even before this analysis also — Year 6 saw a massive leap forward with four of the five Supporting voice nominees being people of color, and that year actually accounts for nearly a third of all POC nominees in the category, but there's obviously some ways to go, still.

 

 

TL:DR across both posts:

• There's a significant gender disparity in the Supporting voice category, with nearly three quarters of all nominees being male.
• The Lead voice category has seen a significant shift towards female roles over the last few years, and female nominees are now in the majority.
• Villain roles take up a plurality of Supporting voice nominees and winners.
• Lead winners paint a staggeringly different picture than nominees, with female leads scoring a significantly larger amount of wins than male leads. In Supporting, the share of male and female leads much more closely matches the nominee count.
• Racial diversity is a continuing issue across all acting categories, voice, motion-capture, or live acting.

Edited September 16, 2021 by cookie

[MCKillswitch123]

Films nominated for Best Picture per word count (longest to shortest) [as of Y9]:

1. The Scavenger Wars Part III [Y7] - 34,185
2. The Scavenger Wars [Y3] - 30,229
3. The Scavenger Wars Part II [Y5] - 24,977
4. The Odyssey: Homecoming [Y4] - 24,435
5. The Queen Who Never Was [Y9] - 23,263
6. Borrasca [Y6] - 20,303
7. The Number One Dime [Y3] - 19,893
8. Fortnight [Y4] - 16,983
9. Spark: Beyond the Sky [Y4] - 16,043
10. The Odyssey: The Counsel of the Dead [Y3] - 15,367
11. Laika [Y7] - 14,037
12. Bambi: A Life in the Woods [Y5] - 13,792
13. Spark: Homeward [Y3] - 13,366
14. Countdown City [Y7] - 13,311
15. World of Trouble [Y8] - 13,117
16. The Most Wanted Man in Great Britain [Y6] - 12,135
17. 24 Hours [Y5] - 11,658
18. American Spy [Y9] - 10,608
19. Gateways [Y6] - 10,514
20. Notes from the Otherspace [Y3] - 10,496
21. The Adventures of Scrooge McDuck [Y1] - 10,286
22. A Woman in the Crowd [Y5] - 9,641
23. By the Balls [Y4] - 9,291
24. Can You Imagine? [Y4] - 9,254
25. Everything I Never Told You [Y8] - 9,135
26. Learning to Care [Y8] - 8,854
27. And the Band Played On [Y2] - 8,801
28. The Bronx is Burning [Y8] - 8,357
29. Ms. Blakk 4 President [Y7] - 7,292
30. Matilda and the Night Children [Y9] - 7,123
31. Paradise Island [Y6] - 6,310
32. The Mirage [Y9] - 5,596
33. Blank [Y2] - 5,415
34. The Rich and Famous [Y5] - 5,233
35. Flowers for Algernon [Y1] - 4,868
36. Sandboy [Y8] - 4,710
37. To the Moon [Y2] - 4,601
38. Children of Eden [Y6] - 4,371
39. Tower of Babylon [Y7] - 4,271
40. 56 Days of Love [Y2] - 3,257
41. The Parvelli Reunion [Y2] - 3,055
42. Warmth [Y9] - 2,814
43. Seeing Her [Y1] - 2,302
44. Faces & Voices: The True Story of Milli Vanilli [Y1] - 2,189
45. White Hurricane [Y1] - 1,964

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Adapted Screenplay spreadsheet has been updated. First post is in the process of being updated.

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First post updated