With the announcement of the 10 Best Picture nominees at the Oscars this week, we can crunch the numbers and see that only Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” has gotten significant traction in movie theaters, grossing almost $400 million worldwide with $107 million of that in North America. No other Best Picture nominee has even come close. So what does that mean for who will win the academy’s top prize?

It has been a long time since the highest-grossing movie won Best Picture at the Oscars. The past few years have especially gone against the box office heavyweights. Last year’s “Nomadland” threw a particularly big monkey wrench in the works, because movie theaters weren’t even open in the two major qualifying cities, New York and L.A., due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

And consider the five years before that:

2015: “Spotlight” ($45m domestic gross) beat “Mad Max Fury Road” ($154m) and “The Martian” ($228.4m) for Best Picture

2016: “Moonlight” ($27.8m) won Best Picture over “La La Land” ($151m), “Arrival” ($100.5m), and “Hidden Figures” ($169.6m)

2017: “The Shape of Water” ($63.9m) took Best Picture over “Dunkirk” ($189.7m), “Get Out” ($176m), and “The Post” ($81.9m)

2018: “Green Book” ($85m) bested “A Star is Born” ($215.3m), “Bohemian Rhapsody ($216.7m), and even “Black Panther” ($700.4m)

2019: “Parasite” ($53.4m) beat “1917” ($159.2m) and “Ford v. Ferrari” ($117.6m)

Putting aside overseas money, here is how the five other Best Picture nominees that have received wide releases in North America have fared (as of Sunday):

“West Side Story” – $36.7 million

“King Richard” – $14.9 million

“Licorice Pizza” – $12.7 million

“Nightmare Alley” – $10.8 million

“Belfast” – $7.4 million

“West Side Story” has done the best of those five nominees, and that’s still only around a third of what “Dune” made. Steven Spielberg’s very first musical is seen as a box office disappointment — Ridley Scott’s “House of Gucci,” which missed out on all but one nomination, grossed more than all five of those nominated Best Pictures — yet “West Side Story” remains the second biggest theatrical hit in the running.

Meanwhile, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car,” which ran rampant with the major critics groups, has yet to make a million dollars in theaters. The movie’s relatively small and mostly repertory distributor, Janus Films, is already looking at its widest release ever in just 115 theaters. Janus also released Paolo Sorrentino’s “The Great Beauty,” which ultimately made $2.8 million domestically and won Best International Feature, and it didn’t have the benefit of a Best Picture nom. The good thing is that all the above movies can theoretically be re-released or expanded into more theaters to take advantage of their Oscar nominations publicity.

But as I wrote a few weeks back, the pandemic has given streamers an advantage since many moviegoers would still rather watch films at home than risk a crowd at a theater. Indeed three out of the 10 Best Picture nominees didn’t even report any domestic box office since streaming was their primary distribution route.

The two Netflix movies that made it into Best Picture – “The Power of the Dog” and “Don’t Look Up”– were released in theaters for a couple weeks before hitting the streamer (where “Don’t Look Up” reportedly found a huge audience), but neither of them reported box office. The same happened with Apple’s “CODA”: after being bought for $25 million at Sundance earlier in 2021, it was released quietly into a handful of theaters but then has mainly found its audience on the Apple TV+ streamer.

Three other streaming movies received a number of nominations, including in key acting categories, but missed out on Best Picture: Netflix’s “Tick, Tick… Boom!” and “The Lost Daughter” received acting nominations, as did Amazon’s “Being the Ricardos.” “The Lost Daughter” also received a screenplay nomination, while “Boom” received an editing nomination, but that’s about it.

Clearly, making the most money doesn’t even guarantee a Best Picture nomination these days, or else “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and “No Time to Die” would have appeared on that list of nominees. So where does that leave us?

For a while “Dune” was one of three presumptive Best Picture front-runners, and it did receive the second most overall nominations (10) and made the most money. Yet Villeneuve missing Best Director puts it in a similar situation as “Argo” 10 years ago, when director Ben Affleck wasn’t nominated. It’s a bigger rarity for a movie to win Best Picture without a directing nomination than for a movie to win without the highest gross, so the fact that “Dune” has made the most money in theaters may not add up to that much, except to justify the money necessarily to finish the Frank Herbert adaptation that still has another half of its story to tell.

The fact is that times are changing, and we’re pivoting into those times as the academy grows and diversifies along with the movie lovers who are becoming accustomed to  hitting “play” on their remotes to watch the academy-selected best movies of the year rather than going to see them in theaters. This might be the new norm for the foreseeable future.

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