1. Immediate saturation release movies, which are more than likely non-snooty, make their money at the beginning of their run. The Dark Knight, frontloaded movie with legs. Iron Man as well. Benjamin Button, even though released late in the year, was front loaded opening in 3000 theaters and making the bulk of its money up front.

2. Non-blockbuster non-oscar bait movies. Might gather steam on actual word of mouth. Possibly snooty, possibly not. Theater count grows or falls on performance.

2. Oscar bait movies, definitely snooty. So snooty they only let people in cities with nominators in them watch the movie until after the nominations. See above for examples.

So the box office before nomination might still be valid as a measure of snootiness if we’re looking for a purely monetary measure of academy snootiness.

Okay, so you just used the grosses of these movies right before the nominations came out? But that doesn’t seem fair at all. The movies released earlier in the year will have completely finished their runs. The movies released very late in the year will just be beginning their runs. Right?

Metacritic’s Best Picture List (minus the foreigns and super-indies) would be in this order:

1. Wall-E
2. Slumdog Millionaire
3. Milk
4. Happy-Go-Lucky
5. The Dark Knight

If you take out Happy-Go-Lucky for being too indie, the next is The Wrestler.

@D: I was thinking about what you said about “best reviewed,” so I went over to Rotten Tomatoes to see what the best reviewed movies of last year were.

If Best Picture nods were based on Rotten Tomatoes rankings, the nods (not counting foreign films) would be:

1. The Wrestler
2. Let the Right One In (indie vampire flick)
3. Wall-E
4. The Dark Knight
5. Slumdog Millionaire

If you take out Let the Right One In ’cause it’s too indie, #6 is a tie between Iron Man and Milk.

The Reader, Benjamin Button, and Doubt are not on Rotten Tomato’s Top 100 of 2008.