Sometimes, sophisticated movies that get nominated and wins Academy awards are not generally well perceived by the public. Some people also say that the Oscars are very political, and that they are forged or manipulated to benefit a group of people, and they are not really awarded for performance. This hypotheses is always backed up with saying that general and critiques rating do not usually align with the awards.
I was assigned a small task as part of an InfoVis project to find out: Do public ratings of movies match academy awards?
I went looking for data for movies, got the imdb movies list data using the API. Ialso managed to get the complete list of Oscars nominations and wins from 1927 to 2010 from AggData. After the data collection phase, I had to clean and process the data a little bit, and merge both databases together. At this point, I had a dataset, where each row represents a movie, with attributes: movie name, year, user rating (from imdb), and number of Oscar awards. I chose to visualize the data as a bubble chart, where every bubble is the movie, and the size of the bubble is the number of awards, and the color (from red to green) is the user rating.
I used d3.js to visualize the data in a static html page. Here is how it looked like:
The visualization actually revealed that most of the movies with high number of Oscar awards got high user ratings (Ratings 8-9 has most academy awards). Moreover, ratings 7-8 mostly has movies with 1-2 awards, and a few of them received more than that. You can see the interactive demo here. When you point at a bubble, the movie name, rating and awards show up.
A small project, but very indicative of the power of visualization.
Engineering The Design 