There has always been a slight correlation between Oscar’s Best Picture category and the box office, usually in that it boosts Best Picture winners beyond $100 million. But what about blockbusters heading TO the Oscars?

The term blockbuster had been used before in other media, but it wasn’t until the massive success of Jaws in 1975 that the term managed to solidify in the superior success of films at the box office. While we can retroactively apply the term to films like Gone With the Wind or The Ten Commandments, the progenitor of the modern blockbuster was Spielberg’s Best Picture-nominated hit. Through the 1980’s, when blockbusters were regularly praised by both critics and audiences, Oscar nominations didn’t always follow. Other than blockbusters like E.T. and Raiders of the Lost Ark, no huge hit made it to the Oscars until the 1990’s when the likes of Ghost ushered in a new era of always-nominate sensibility.

More often than not, a sub-$100 million grosser got a boost from the Oscars. Films like Terms of Endearment, Rain Man, Driving Miss Daisy and Unforgiven can thank the Oscars for adding at least 30% to their totals. In the last few years, this trend has started again with Juno, Slumdog Millionaire, The King’s Speech and Black Swan riding their nominations to box office success.

Now that the Academy has expanded its Best Picture slate to anywhere from 5-to-10 nominations, the hope from the Academy was that more blockbusters (or at least box office hits) would make it through. In the first year, when there was a mandatory 10 nominees, their hopes had been born out. Avatar, District 9, Inglourious Basterds and Up were all over $100 million when their Best Picture nominations came in 2009. In 2010, four more films made appearances in Best Picture with strong box office numbers, The Blind Side, Inception, Toy Story 3 and True Grit. Yet, there were some less than exciting prospects in terms of box office success in the list of Best Picture nominees (even though all of the hits except The Blind Side were well received by critics), which led the Academy to change their rules again last year. Now, their confusing methodology of selecting nominees can end up with anywhere from 5 to 10 nominees in the race. The end result was only 9 nominations in 2011, but fewer were blockbusters and box office hits. Only The Help was anything in the way of a hit and even that wasn’t too enthusiastically approved by critics. So, what happened?

It’s hard to tell, 2011’s blockbuster list was rather anemic in terms of critical favorites and those that were popular with both audiences and critics, suffered a great deal from being A) heavily genre-oriented, B) part of a larger franchise, or C) a combination of both. Looking at the last three years might give us a bit of input into what films we should look for to “cross-over” this year.

There are three metrics we’re going to look at, two of which are purposefully similar. First is the box office. I pulled data only on films that grossed more than $100 million at the box office. I then found their Rotten Tomatoes score (a review of positive/negative views of the film) and cross-referenced that with the Metacritic score (an average of individual ratings). I compared the box office numbers and then removed anything that scored under 70% on Rotten Tomatoes. This removed one Best Picture nominee, The Blind Side. I then further removed anything scoring under 70 on Metacritic. This eliminated Best Picture nominees The Help and Inglourious Basterds (I expanded the Metacritic list to include 69, which brought Basterds back in since it seemedland on the strongly positive side; however, The Help ended up with a score of 62 from Metacritic, which suggests the RT score was more a benevolent “not bad” result than a generally positive critical reaction). Which left us with 23 films. Of these 23 films, 9 films were Best Picture nominees (including post-Oscar victors The King’s Speech and Black Swan.

Further restricting the Rotten Tomatoes numbers to anything above 80%, we eliminate two more films (The Hangover and Iron Man 2, which both had low-70% results), and neither of which were Best Picture nominees. Of the remaining 12 films, the films that didn’t carry over to Best Picture were two Harry Potter films, Star Trek, Bridesmaids, Rango, How to Train Your Dragon, The Princess and the Frog, Super 8, Despicable Me, Tangled, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

What can we tell about these films. They fall strictly into three categories. Five of them are animated, four of them are films in long-running franchises and two are from long- and frequently-ignored genres (Comedy and Science Fiction). That leaves only The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a film which many of us thought would be on the final Best Picture slate last year. While I lump Super 8 and Bridesmaids solely into the un-Academy-friendly genre camp, the two Harry Potter films (fantasy), Star Trek (science fiction) and Mission: Impossible (spy thriller) can be lumped into the genre category as well.

But what of the actual nominees, Avatar, Toy Story 3, Up, District 9 and Inception? Two would fall into the animation subset and the other three fall into science fiction. So how did they trump the aforementioned three-category instant disqualification? Avatar was an extreme blockbuster, which couldn’t be ignored. Toy Story 3 and Up transcend animation thanks to Pixar’s influence. They were both adult-friendly, unlike the perceptions of the other animated films that didn’t make it which would be considered children’s films. That leaves Inception and District 9, neither of which fit the traditional sci-fi mold, but neither did Super 8. Inception‘s inclusion could be due to its near-$300 million box office total, another traditional blockbuster, but the real reason is likely combined with one factor: the specific reason the category’s rules were changed in the first place.

In 2008, two hugely popular films with critics and audiences, were snubbed for Best Picture nominations in spite of being on a number of prediction lists for the 81st Academy Awards. What will forever be known as the WALL-E/Dark Knight rule, the Academy decided that it needed to have broader appeal and couldn’t continue to ignore blockbusters based on long-standing biases within the Academy’s older voters (though, these are the same people who would have or did vote for films like Around the World in 80 Days or Dances With Wolves). This is one of the reasons I think that Inception picked up the nomination. What kind of backlash would the Academy have faced had they once again ignored its director Christopher Nolan, the man behind The Dark Knight? It would have been tremendous. By putting Inception into the race alongside a slate of other well received blockbusters, the Academy allayed a lot of fears. I don’t think that the Academy really embraced Inception, its absence from both Best Director and the would-have-been-well-deserved Best Editing categories are signs of that.

What of District 9? It was one of the best reviewed blockbusters of its year that didn’t feel as much like a science-fiction film as Star Trek did, which also suffered from being a franchise parcel. I don’t think District 9 was included so much because it was better (which I thought it was), but because many voters showed their bias against Star Trek as being part of a long-running franchise.

That brings us to 2012. With the year finally over and many high profile blockbusters and hits out of the way, it’s time to look at what could be in contention for the Oscars this year.

As of this week, 26 films have crossed the magic $100 million mark (though, the same ticket sales back in 1989 would have resulted in only 11 films passing that threshhold) and a further 5 films are close enough that they could still pass the mark in the next few weeks (Flight, Rise of the Guardians, Life of Pi, Les Misérables and Django Unchained are those five). Looking at only those 31 films and using the aforementioned 70% Rotten Tomatoes and 69 MetaCritic guidelines, we can very quickly eliminate all but 12 films. Some of those we will come back to in a little bit.

The twelve films that meet all three criteria are 21 Jump Street, Argo, The Avengers, Brave, The Dark Knight Rises, Django Unchained, Flight, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Magic Mike, Skyfall and Wreck-it Ralph

If you then look at the three factors I mentioned earlier: 1) Genre Film, 2) Franchise Film and 3) combination, you elimite all but Argo, Flight, Life of Pi, Lincoln and Magic Mike. Of those five films, four of them have been frequently mentioned as Best Picture nominees. Magic Mike is the outlier of the group. It isn’t a genre film or a franchise film, yet it doesn’t seem to be on the radar for an Oscar nomination. Still we cannot take it for granted that the film won’t crop into the nominations at this point.

Of the remaining seven films, factor 1 eliminates Django Unchained and Wreck-It Ralph; factor 2 drops 21 Jump Street and Brave; and factor 3 gets rid of The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises and Skyfall. But certain factors might keep a few of these in the conversation.

Django Unchained, despite being a genre film, is the latest film from Oscar frequenter Quentin Tarantino. He’s eliminated the Genre Gap on two prior occasions. Most recently, he did so with Holocause revenge drama Inglourious Basterds and before that with Pulp Fiction. What’s noteworthy here is that Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction was a turning point in the 1990’s for a lot of niche films finally being considered by the Academy for major awards. Although a trickle of genre flicks made it into the race, Pulp Fiction redefined how the Academy looked at such films. While Django isn’t on the celebrated par of either of his previous two Best Picture entries, I think Tarantino will once again break the genre barrier and net a nomination.

After two successful years of Best Picture inclusions, Pixar stumbled with its critically maligned Cars 2 last year. This year, while the critics were friendlier, Brave didn’t perform well enough to become the de facto Pixar entry into Best Picture. It will still likely make the Best Animated Feature lineup, but no manner of pressure will get it into Best Picture.

The Avengers, like Avatar was a huge box office hit, dwarfing its nearest competition by nearly $200 million. That’s a sizable chunk of money and, on top of it all, the film did quite well with critics. Whereas Avatar was an original genre film, The Avengers‘ trouble is that it’s also a franchise film, which is almost doubly dangerous for such consideration. Consider Star Trek, J.J. Abrams’ reboot of the vaunted franchise. The film did incredibly well with critics and even managed to make it onto the Producers Guild of America ten-best slate. All signs pointed to a first-time nomination in Best Picture for the series. Yet, when the nominations were announced, Trek was absent. That suggests that while the Academy has been friendly to genre films, it likes them original, not derived, based on or rebooted from prior works. Don’t look for the Academy to make an exception for The Avengers just because it made over $620 million at the domestic box office.

What hinders The Avengers, will likely hinder both The Dark Knight Rises and Skyfall. For The Dark Knight Rises, the bigger hindrance is the fact that the film wasn’t as well received by critics as its predecessor, and in spite of being one of the key reasons the category was expanded to “up to” ten nominations, Christopher Nolan earned his recognition with Inception and the Academy is unlikely to harbor any guilt for the prior snubs leading Dark Knight Rises and the Batman franchise to continue to be ignored. Skyfall, on the other hand, did amazingly well with critics and has been hailed by many as one of the franchise’s best films. Yet, even though the effusive praise nabbed Star Trek a Best Picture nomination from the Producers Guild, a similar (and likely) result for Skyfall will likely result in the same avoidance by the Academy simply because a single film in a vaunted franchise breaking the critic barrier won’t be enough to lead them to a change of heart.

Having examined the possibilities, I think we are certain to see a near-record number of already-$100 million films in the Best Picture slate, but much of that record will be set by films that already fall into the Academy’s filmic comfort zone. In 2009, four existing box office successes made the initial Best Picture lineup. The same number followed through in 2010. In 2011, there was only one that started north of $100 million. For 2012? We’re looking at two films (Lincoln and Argo) that will already have passed the milestone in the slate (unless Life of Pi, Les Misérables and/or Django Unchained surpass $100 million before next week’s Oscar nominations, which is unlikely). The Academy won’t feel the need to expand beyond those “acceptable” hits, so don’t look for too many historical events accompanying this year’s final slate.

In the end, like all methods of prognostication, a lot of gut reaction and opinion has to be mixed into the formulae and suppositions made that aren’t easy to quantify. Still, what we’ve looked at above may be a fair guideline to understanding just how successful the Academy’s rules will and have been.