The 2021 Oscar ceremony was an anomaly across the board, from the somber tone to the intimate setting to the detrimental choice of naming best actor as the final award of the evening. But the strangest sight of all was witnessing a spate of women gather on the dais to accept the best picture trophy. Nomadland won best actress for Frances McDormand, best director for Chloé Zhao and best picture for them and three other producers. The last time best picture and best actress went to the same movie was nearly two decades ago, in 2005, when boxing drama Million Dollar Baby took home the big prize and Hilary Swank was bestowed her second Oscar.

This kind of triumph will not be possible at the 2022 ceremony, because not a single best actress nominee has her film up for best picture. Jessica Chastain (The Eyes of Tammy Faye), Olivia Colman (The Lost Daughter), Penélope Cruz (Parallel Mothers), Nicole Kidman (Being the Ricardos) and Kristen Stewart (Spencer) won’t have the luxury of their work being doubly venerated beyond their performances.

Their fiery acting is clearly strong enough for the Academy, but the films themselves are apparently just not up to snuff. Meanwhile, best actor nominees Benedict Cumberbatch (The Power of the Dog) and Will Smith (King Richard) could take home the Oscar alongside their best picture-nominated films.

While it’s actually somewhat rare to see best picture and best actor triumphs go to the same film (it has only occurred twice since 2011, with The King’s Speech and The Artist), it’s still rather common that a best actor nom in particular will accompany a best picture nom.

The gender divide between what stories we value and what performances we value is stark. Throughout Oscar history, 27 best actor victories occurred in movies that also won for the top prize. By contrast, only 12 best actress victories came in films that took best picture. To put it in simpler terms, the past 11 consecutive best actor champions worked in films nominated for best picture. (For more on the correlation between best actor/actress and best picture noms and wins, see sidebar.)

Think the disparities are marginal? Think again. Looking at the lead acting noms at large since 2002, including this year’s crop, a whopping 59 percent of best actor noms have gone to performances in best picture-nominated films. Outrageously, that percentage drops by almost half for best actress noms — merely 35 percent of those corresponded with a best picture nom.

These numbers, while useful in identifying overarching trends, don’t tell the whole story of these confounding gender correlations. Determining what is a male-driven versus female-driven film is harder to quantify just by glancing at best picture stats. For example, looking at this year’s best picture race, I would argue that Belfast, Don’t Look Up, Drive My Car, Dune, King Richard, Nightmare Alley and The Power of the Dog center on a male point of view based on the combinations of their scripts, directors and lead performances. Licorice Pizza and West Side Story are trickier to pinpoint because their approaches are more balanced along the gender binary. Out of the 10 contenders, however, only CODA stands out to me as a primarily female-driven story, and the fact that just a single film out of such a large group represents a female perspective aligns with the trends of the past decade of Oscar choices.

Alongside CODA, which may very well be the dark horse winner March 27, films such as Nomadland; Promising Young Woman; Little Women; The Favourite; Roma; The Shape of Water; Lady Bird; Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri; Arrival; Hidden Figures; Brooklyn; Room; Gravity; Philomena; Beasts of the Southern Wild; Zero Dark Thirty; The Help; Black Swan; Winter’s Bone; The Blind Side; An Education and Precious stand out as the only exclusively female-centered stories of the past 120 or so best picture noms. That’s 23 films.

What’s really the engine behind this gendered disparity? In my eyes, it’s simple. Most male-driven best picture nominees are seen, perhaps subconsciously, as “universal” stories — they’re often the war tragedies, the legal and political sagas, the superhero flicks, the Westerns, the crime thrillers, the sports dramas, etc. Female-driven best picture nominees are more typically coming-of-age stories, family dramas, idiosyncratic indies or uplifting crowd-pleasers. They’re often more personal/individual and thus perhaps more “exotic” to traditional Academy voters, who tend to be older, white and male.

For instance, the Academy loves a biopic, though a man starring in a biopic is generally more likely to have his film nominated in other major categories — including screenplay, director, editing and best picture — than a female actor starring in a biopic. (A notable portion of the biographical best actress honorees of the past few years were one-off noms for films with a showy lead role that otherwise didn’t connect to wider voter audiences, like 2021’s Spencer, 2020’s The United States vs. Billie Holiday, 2016’s Loving and 2015’s Joy.) Biodramas don’t usually have the best reputation among cinephiles as they’re often seen as formulaic and cloying, but biodramas featuring women are usually even less well-received, sometimes snidely compared by critics to made-for-TV movies.

Overall, it seems male-driven best picture noms benefit from the grit and muscle of an acting performance, while best actress noms often go to stars playing big characters with big emotions who don’t inspire other accolades outside of craft fields. Best actress wins, for example, often go to more histrionic performances than best actor, which typically favor quiet rage, and recently, many of these showier roles — in 2019’s Judy, 2014’s Still Alice, 2013’s Blue Jasmine and 2011’s The Iron Lady among them — were unaccompanied by best picture noms.

Based on her SAG Award triumph, Chastain appears to be the frontrunner this year for Tammy Faye, another disregarded biopic. Perhaps when voters start accepting more quiet rage from lead actresses, voters will start seeing female-centered stories as universal, too.

This story first appeared in a March stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.