Péter's Digital Reference Shelf
February 2004

Title: Official Academy Awards Database
Publisher: Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS)
URL: http://www.oscars.org/awardsdatabase/index.html
Cost: Free
Tested: Jan. 15-18, 2004

Almost a year ago, days before the 75th Annual Academy Awards, I was disappointed that I still could not find a searchable database about Oscar nominations and awards on the Academy's site. After all, the diamond anniversary of the Oscars was just around the corner — a not-to-be missed deadline to deliver, not as if there isn't much need for an excuse in Hollywood to show off and strut with something or someone new. There are other sources that provide excellent information about Oscar winners and nominees and their movies, but getting the information from the horse's mouth is always the best. As the Academy put it on its home page: "users can rely upon the authority of what they find here."

Well, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), which has a decent overall site, missed that opportunity, although they finally released a minimalist database a few months later. To me it was like getting a heart-shaped box of cheap chocolate in mid-July. I could have still put aside my pouting and let it be my database Valentine, but it is also more than a dollar short, containing only paltry content — like many Hollywood acts.

Considering that the Official Academy Awards Database (OAAD) is the digital equivalent of the loose-leaf publication, I can't fathom what took so long to produce this database in a town where being there and being seen matters most, and where people are willing to do the weirdest things for any amount of visibility.

It's not that details of glamour and "amour" are beyond the Academy. The Academy has been more than willing to benefit from these two characteristic traits for years. It happily advertises and links to its ultra-commercial Oscar sister site, co-created with ABC, that has a number of sub-sites about Red Carpet moments and urges visitors to "browse these Oscar Night images to relive the glamour and excitement of the Red Carpet." I found the content of the database (just like the Red Carpet Gallery) rather inferior in more ways than one. And the glamorous redness of the carpet seemed more like the unglamorous mauve of worn-out carpets at once-glorious hotels now relegated to hosting 50-year reunions. For fairness, the carpet was almost perfectly color-coordinated with the non-attributed dress of actress-turned-reverend Sally Kirkland, or is that the other way around?

The Content

There is minimal information about the 2,750 movies and 4,300 individuals who have been nominated and/or won an Academy Award in the past 75 years. To its credit, the database includes all of the related awards, such as the Honorary Awards and the Thalberg Memorial Awards, that other movie databases often ignore. This is a relatively small database by definition, but what may massively disappoint you is the gauntness of the records.

Compared to the details provided about the Red Carpet seconds of fame, the information about the movies, actors, actresses, directors and other artists and contributors is extremely frugal. True, the database covers not only the most well-publicized regular awards that appear in any good almanac, such as the Best Picture and Best Actor awards, but also lesser-known awards, such as Best Documentary Feature, Best Short Subject Documentary, and Best Film Editing, for every year the awards have been given. Still, the records are skeletal to say the least.

When you click on a title to get more information about a movie, you get what may not even suffice for a short-entry catalog in a tiny public library. If the movie was nominated in more categories, those awards are also listed. Exceptionally, a note is appended to the record providing some useful information, such as the reason for the disqualification of a movie nominated by Uruguay.

The same is true for artists and other contributors. The record about Oscar-winning Juliette Binoche is very frugal, especially when compared with the richness of information about her, or any other person, in the superb All Movie Guide database or with the splendid Internet Movie Database (IMDB). We learn a bit more about Katharine Hepburn, or at least about her awards and nominations, as she was in the limelight for quite a long time.

I would have expected AMPAS to make available its list of films that were submitted by more than 100 countries every year since the introduction of the Best Foreign Language Film Award, as it is not part of other Oscar databases. True, it is much broader than the handful of foreign-language movies that finally get nominated every year, but in my experience quite a number of these foreign films represent the best in the art and are worthy for raising art awareness, which is what you would expect from AMPAS. Many could use such a list as the basis for an abridged "must see" list.

While AMPAS has had good relations with other organizations, such as ABC, and co-produced the oscar.com site with the broadcast company, it apparently has not established relationships with any of the highly relevant companies that could have substantially enhanced the content of OAAD, and in turn benefited from the association with the Oscars.

It is ironic and disappointing that we can learn who provided the dresses for the dates of some of the supporting actors appearing in the Red Carpet Gallery, but we can learn nothing about the films, crew and casts members nominated for the awards. I bet this year we shall even see captions like "lipstick by Revlon," "conditioner by Avon" and "moisturizer by L'Oreal."

It is another issue that the captioning of many of the pictures are very Hollywoodish and focus on the celebrities while totally ignoring their partners, something that not even the most snobbish butlers or hare-brained bouncers of the glitterati clubs would do. For example, then-Governor Gray Davis is identified in a photo, but the First Lady of California is not. Likewise, the captionist apparently did not know enough about the celebrities, as the failure to recognize Robert Duvall's wife illustrates. So, while we learn that his indistinguishable tuxedo is from Dolce & Gabbana, we remain uninformed about his companion and partner Luciana Pedraza and about the likely more interesting tidbit (for haute couture worshippers) of where her dress is from.

Since their site lacks details about award winners and nominees, AMPAS really should make arrangements to link to one of the best movie sites in order to get high quality, reliable and informative details about the nominated movies, complete with synopses and preferably reviews, and the artists and crew members (with biographies).

IMDB is very liberal with all types of links and documents the process very well. Other companies might also be willing to cooperate with AMPAS as a gesture of good will to support a free product, and in return get free publicity. The New York Times, which is badly in need of good publicity, recently made available all of its reviews published during the past 20+ years, and all the reviews of movies that won Best Picture — with the odd exception of last year's Academy Awards. It seems only natural to link from the skeletal AMPAS records of the winners and nominees of the Best Picture award to the more than 5,000 free New York Times reviews.

AMPAS also could have linked some of the movies to its other database, the Index to Motion Picture Credits (IMPC), but it did not. Though still under development, IMPC covers movies produced since 1991 and is quite detailed about the cast and crew, but provides nothing about the movies' content. It is a very far cry from the excellent structuring of items in IMDB. IMPC records very often become extremely crowded and difficult to read; they also don't provide links to open access databases. Additionally, the IMPC is almost hidden from the users. Even if you go to the site-map of AMPAS you may miss it because it is at the very bottom of the second screen.

The Software

There is not much to say about the software simply because there is not much to search for in this database. The query template in the Basic Search mode is fine and allows searches by names of nominees and movie titles. The search may be limited to those nominees who won by using a check box. A pull-down menu limits results to specific awards. Although only one award can be selected, the designers of OAAD created supersets of award categories. This is obviously handy when you want to know if, for example, Paul Newman was nominated for any acting awards. Simply selecting the pseudo-category "Acting (žall)" will tell you.

The same motivation justifies the pseudo search category "Documentary (žall)." These categories act like the explode commands in some implementations of MEDLINE that allow you to search for a term and all its subordinated (narrower) terms.

The search can be limited to a given year range, too, and searching is possible for song titles in a flexible way. For example, if you want to find the movie with the song "Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman," you may do so using one or two words from its title. Choose the most distinct word (like "really") from song titles for the best results.

You cannot search by other attributes of the movies because they are just not there. You also cannot search by country of origin, even though that information is available in the records. However, if you know at least one nominated title from the country in which you are interested, you are set. By displaying that record you can click on the linked country name that will launch a search. This technique is also efficient for when you want to start a search prompted by something you see in the results of another search.

There are also tabs for Advanced Search and Statistical Search. Both of them yield the same "result": A message that they are under construction.

The Statistical Search mode could be very useful, and that's exactly what I expected from AMPAS. I can only speculate, but I hope it will be able to answer such common ready-reference questions as: which actors, actresses, cinematographers and movies received the most nominations and/or awards in the respective categories, or in any categories combined; who acted in the most nominated movies; which countries had the most nominations in the Foreign Language Film category; how many movies from Spain were nominated for any Oscar category; or who received nominations or who won awards for two or more years in a row?

I also expect much better visualization from this search mode. I would like to see, for example, a spider web display of a given person showing which directors, actors, actresses and cinematographers she or he was nominated with. True, it will be limited to movies that at least were nominated for one or more categories. For example, you would see Ingmar Bergman associated with Sven Nykvist, the master cinematographer, in only two movies, even though they worked together on many more, because only two of their jointly created movies were nominated.

Again, AMPAS should enhance its records with information about other awards that a movie or one of its cast or crew members received from the top five or six other respected award committees. This information would allow users to find answers to such reference questions as which movies won, were selected or nominated for the Oscar, Palm D'Or, New York Film Critics Circle, Golden Globe, Directors' Guild of America or other awards.

There are some excellent and many good movie databases and Web sites and OAAD is better than the worst I have seen. In the January 2004 issue of Péter's Picks and Pans, I panned CineBook's brutally maimed version of the Oscar subset on the TV Guide site. Although it was removed, my review of this lemon illustrates how badly movie information can be presented. Without seeing substantial enhancements discussed above, I don't see many reasons to use OAAD, which becomes the least informative (though luckily not misinformative) movie database. It badly needs enhancement.