In honor of tonight's Golden Globe awards, here are a couple of movie-related posts:

I'll probably post my Oscar predictions sometime soon, but for starters, here's a sure thing: My Big Fat Greek Wedding will receive Best Picture and Best Actress nominations, and will in all likelihood win Best Actress. I have several reasons for believing this, but as for the most compelling, please take a look at the following list:

1. My Big Fat Greek Wedding (0.25%)*
2. Shakespeare in Love (2.60%)*
3. American Beauty (4.57%)*
4. Titanic (4.77%)*
5. Dances With Wolves (5.15%)*
6. Ghost (5.60%)*
7. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (5.95%)*
8. Home Alone (5.98%)
9. Scream (6.17%)
10. Beauty and the Beast (6.60%)*
11. Good Will Hunting (7.41%)*
12. Forrest Gump (7.42%)*
13. There's Something About Mary (7.79%)
14. As Good As It Gets (8.54%)*
15. Look Who's Talking (8.64%)
16. Aladdin (8.89%)
17. The Sixth Sense (9.09%)*
18. Mrs. Doubtfire (9.34%)
19. A Beautiful Mind (9.70%)*

An odd bunch of movies, certainly. In case it isn't obvious, these are the biggest sleeper hits of the past fifteen years or so, the definition of a sleeper hit being a movie that grosses over $100 million at the domestic box office, with the opening weekend accounting for less than 10% of that gross. (The number in parentheses is the actual percentage of the gross represented by the opening weekend, courtesy of Box Office Guru.)

Obviously, not many movies qualify as sleeper hits; great word of mouth and awards recognition are about the only things that matter. And you'll probably agree that the resultant list is much more interesting than the Spielberg- and Lucas-dominated list of all-time box office blockbusters.

But the astonishing thing is how many of these movies received Academy Award nominations for Best Picture (marked by an asterisk). In fact, whenever a sleeper hit is even halfway plausible as a contender, it inevitably gets a nomination. (The sole exception is Aladdin, which suffered from coming too soon after Beauty and the Beast).

Which is what makes My Big Fat Greek Wedding such a sure thing. The Academy won't be able to overlook what is possibly the biggest sleeper hit of all time (at least since the time when opening weekend numbers became at all relevant, i.e. the late 1970s). The Academy Awards love movies that make money almost as consistently as they snub movies that lose money, so odds are we'll be seeing Nia Vardalos step up to the podium more than once come Oscar night.

(I spent way too much time researching this post, by the way....*@%#ing three-day weekends....)