They say that hosting the Oscars is the most thankless job in Hollywood — but who’s gotten the most thanks at the annual awards?
Steven Spielberg, it turns out — coming in just behind God — as well as Harvey Weinstein, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Peter Jackson, Sheila Nevins and Martin Scorsese.
Film industry analyst Peter Follows set out to determine if the Tinseltown trope that (now incarcerated, onetime king of the film biz) Weinstein has been “thanked more often than God” from the Academy Awards stage is true.
Follows crunched the data on 1,884 speeches given by Oscar winners, and found that, “God was thanked 4.3% of the time, whereas Harvey was mentioned in just 1.5%,” via his Substack.
“But there was someone who actually was thanked more often than God during that period [the ‘80s and ‘90s]” he writes, and that’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “Jurassic Park” director Spielberg.
“The only other person who can claim to have been ‘bigger than God’ was Peter Jackson,” figured Follows, “who achieved his status in the 2000s, with 9.0% compared to God’s 7.0%.”
But, “In every other decade, God remained the most thanked figure.”
Jackson, of course, is behind the long-running “The Lord of the Rings” franchise.
The only woman on the most-thanked list is Nevins — the former head of HBO Documentary Films, and the only person on the list who’s perhaps not a household name outside the industry.
She told Follows: “I was very surprised to see that, but I have been doing it for so long. I have been doing the grunt work for so long. I think when people get up there, they decide for me. So they say, ‘Thank you’. It is lovely to be thanked, and it really hurts when you are not thanked. I have been thanked for things I did not deserve, and I have been not thanked for things I bled over.”
As far as Spielberg beating out the Creator during one epic stretch, she said she was not surprised because, “God does not attend… God cannot give them their next job — Steven Spielberg can.”
And, Follows concludes: “Across all speeches, God was thanked 4.3% of the time, whereas Harvey was mentioned in just 1.5%.”
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