Box Office Grosses and the Little Gold Man

So ... what's most helpful when striving for a shiny statue?

... I thought it would be interesting to track the average global box office grosses from this year's Academy Award nominees, per category. ... This year's numbers, compared to the last two years, were heavily skewed by the box office behemoth "Gravity" which, tied with "American Hustle", earned more nominations than any other film. ...

The Best Animated Feature's average box office was boosted by three megahits ("Despicable Me 2" ($970M), "Frozen" ($867M) and "The Croods" ($587M)), giving the category an average box office earning of $506M.

But at the top of the heap, yet again, is the visual effects category. Buoyed by "Gravity"'s giant earnings, the average visual effects Academy Award nominee earned $698M globally. Even with earning nearly $700M, "Gravity" is actually the third highest grossing film of the category, after "Iron Man 3" ($1.2B) and "The Hobbit 2" ($855M).

The five nominees for visual effects earned a total global box office gross of $3.5 billion. ...

It's been true since the dawn of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that hit motion pictures end up winning most of the Little Gold Men (r). Once in a while a small-budget art film slips in, but the big successful movies predominate in the major categories.

For visual effects, does anybody seriously believe a movie other than Gravity will win? And isn't Frozen the odds-on favorite to take the "Best Animated Feature" category. It's a huge grosser. It isn't a sequel. And it's the release with the Big Mo at just the right time.

It's always possible that I'm wrong, but I don't think I will be.