Everyone’s a critic on Oscar night, but how do you decide which American movies will stand the test of time?
A Northwestern study suggests future filmmakers may be the ultimate judge.
A professor looking for a way to objectively assess creative projects tried his theory out on movies, examining how many times movies and TV shows give a creative hat tip to other movies.
These can be direct references but also more subtle ones: Think the shower scene in “Psycho,” and how many times you’ve seen other thrillers build tension in a similar way.
Luis Amaral mined the massive IMDb, or Internet Movie Database, to create a list of the most-referenced movies, then checked to see if that list matched a benchmark, the National Film Registry.
Turns out all of the top 25 most-cited are also in the National Film Registry. The No. 1 most referenced: “The Wizard of Oz.”
Other films he and his graduate-student assistants deem significant include “Casablanca,” “Gone With the Wind,” “The Godfather,” “Jaws” and “Night of the Living Dead.”
They say it all comes down to other references, everything from direct mentions to directorial nods. Luis Amaral, a chemical and biological-engineering professor and co-director of the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems, says future citations are the surest way to spot a film with lasting impact.
“Directors keep coming back to movies that are significant,” he said. “If you show a little bit from ‘Psycho,’ such as referencing the shower scene, you are putting that movie in front of the viewer of the new movie.”
Amaral’s “Cross-evaluation of metrics to estimate the significance of creative works,” published in January in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, was co-authored with Northwestern graduate students Max Wasserman and Xiao Han T. Zeng.
The study looked at IMDb.com mentions including critical reviews, awards, public opinion and box-office sales, collecting data on more than 15,000 movies to determine which had the most citations.
The researchers then checked to see which of the most highly cited films are also in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress – which they saw as the best available benchmark of cinematic significance. The registry names up to 25 films each year that it deems culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.
The 25 most-cited films in the IMDb database are also in the registry. The researchers said this shows that a movie’s number of citations reflects its significance and note that you have to dig down to 26th on the IMDb-citations list — “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” — to find a movie that’s not in the National Film Registry.
“It doesn’t mean that you have to have liked all the movies on this list,” Amaral said. “It’s good to have methods that make decisions like this more objective. Otherwise it comes down to who is shouting the loudest.”
Amaral hopes to apply this method to evaluating the importance of scientific papers.
