2021
O Oscar deles
Country/area: Brazil
Organisation: UOL
Organisation size: Big
Publication date: 9 Feb 2020

Credit: Judite Cypreste; Beatriz Amendola
Project description:
Based on the construction and analysis of a database on the biggest awards in world cinema, this report shows how Oscar has always had a predisposition to favor actors, instead of actresses. Over the weeks, the UOL report took on the mission of analyzing the winners of 91 Oscar editions in the categories of best film, best actor and best actress, in order to identify who were the protagonists of the long winners and what kind of role they played men and women the most coveted awards in cinema.
Impact reached:
With data, we show that the Oscar has always valued men more: an analysis shows that of 91 films that won the Best Film award, 62 had a man as a protagonist, while 19 were protagonists of both genders and only 10 were only a female protagonist.
In addition, we showed the occupations / professions of the awards for best actor and best actress and found that most actresses played women without any occupation in a film.
Another curious fact was to discover that 3 women who win the award for best actress did not speak in their films. Another 3 were victims of rape and 1 was a victim of psychological abuse.
After the publication of this report, Oscar announced goals of racial and gender diversity at the awards.
Techniques/technologies used:
For the construction of the database with names of the winners in the categories of Best Film, Best Actress and Best Actor, a data scraping was carried out on the Wikipedia page of each category using the Python Pandas library. To analyze the films and build the rest of the database, the Google Sheets tool was used.
What was the hardest part of this project?
The most complicated part was reading more than 239 film synopses to build the database.
What can others learn from this project?
In addition to understanding how the academy works and all its history of gender non-igudalde, it is possible that fellow journalists can access the open source scraping and analysis used by the report.