I'd Like to Thank the Academy, Complementary Productivity, and Social Networks

Nicole Esparza (Princeton Univ.) and Gabriel Rossman (UCLA)

ABSTRACT

This paper explores under what conditions a film actor will be nominated for an Academy Award. Our analysis is based on data from the Internet Movie Database on 171,539 performances by 39,518 actors in 19,351 films. There are a total of 1,394 nominations. Controlling for the actor's personal history and basic traits of the film we explore hypotheses related to two distinct sets of predictions about the actor's social ties. First, we test the extent to which the skill of team members (directors, screenwriters, and co-stars) complements the actor's performance. This allows us to test whether the efforts of high quality workers spill over onto their team members. In other words, does having Robert DeNiro as a co-star make one more likely to be nominated for an Oscar? Second, we test whether network ties to Academy members make an actor more likely to be nominated for an Oscar. That is, does your having worked with Robert DeNiro in the past make it more likely that he will nominate you for an award today? We find that spillover effects from team members are highly significant but network effects of knowing academy members are trivial.