Welcome to Edition #94 of Gorick's newsletter, where Harvard career advisor and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Gorick Ng shares what they don't teach you in school about how to succeed in your career.
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→ Read time: 7 min
STORY
What Oscar award winners (and losers) have to teach us about being remembered
Two days ago, 20 million people tuned in for Hollywood’s “biggest night”: the Academy Awards, also known as the Oscars.
Every year, nominees across 22 categories compete for “the most prestigious awards in the entertainment industry,” from “Best Actor” to “Best Original Score.”
The system is simple: whoever gets the most votes wins.
Who gets to vote? Members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Presumably, the best of the best wins… right?
Not necessarily.
So, who has a better shot at winning? Films released towards the end of the year—and therefore right before voting begins.
The data doesn’t lie: the vast majority of Oscar-nominated films are released in September, October, November, and especially December (as shown in the lighter green regions in the chart below).
Psychologists even have a term for this: recency bias, or the “tendency to place greater weight” on more recent events.
(This bias explains a host of things in life. This is why it’s easier to remember items at the end of a list over items at the beginning of a list. And when it comes to politics, recent events have a way of drowning out the past, as we saw with our story on why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is suddenly popular again in Canada.)
“But what if,” you ask, “Movie studios secretly know which movies have the potential to win the Oscars—and wait until the end of the year to release them?”
This “unspoken rule” of winning the Oscars is really an open secret. Hollywood even has terms to explain the games that studios play:
What are blockbuster epics that are released towards the end of the year called? “Oscar Bait.”
When are low-budget movies with even lower expectations released? During the “Dump Months” of January and February.
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And even once a movie is out, studios pour millions of dollars—sometimes 50% of a movie’s production budget and sometimes even more—into marketing to ensure those same films remain part of the conversation. (Remember Barbie? Click here to read my story.)
And so we get to my biggest disappointment from this year’s Oscars: The fact that my favorite movie of 2024—Dune: Part Two, directed by Denis Villeneuve (whom I’ve featured before)—wasn’t even nominated for Best Director.
A big reason—according to the Internet, at least? It was released in March of 2024—so was soon drowned out by later releases.
To add insult to injury, Dune: Part Two was actually supposed to be released in November 2023—but then Hollywood labor strikes “left the actors unable to promote the film.”
Though the movie itself got 5 nominations, Villeneuve himself was left out of consideration for Best Director, sparking—you guessed it—cries of recency bias.
Come this past Sunday, March 2, the 2025 Oscars reinforced this trend—for the most part. Top winners included:
- Anora (5 Oscars, released on October 18, 2024)
- The Brutalist (3 Oscars, released on December 20, 2024)
- Wicked (2 Oscars, released on November 22, 2024)
- Emilia Pérez (2 Oscars, released on November 1, 2024)
As for Dune: Part Two? Though Villeneuve himself didn’t get any awards, let alone nominations, his sci-fi sequel earned both Best Sound and Best Visual Effects.
Maybe there’s room for change—or simply exceptions to the norm.
Either way, the next time you see an Oscar-nominated or Oscar-winning film, it’s time to ask yourself, “Did this movie win because of great acting, directing, costumes, visual effects, etc., or because of great timing?”
UNSPOKEN RULE
Being remembered matters—in Hollywood and in your career.
Hollywood isn’t the only place where recency bias exists. It’s true in every workplace.
That year-end performance evaluation? Your manager will be thinking about your most recent performance—while forgetting that heroic effort you pulled off in February.
That promotion or hiring decision? The committee will be advocating for the candidate who demonstrated The 3 C’s most recently and consistently.
The bottom line is: Don’t assume that people will remember what you’ve done or even who you are. Remind people at every turn.
Here are just 2 of many everyday workplace situations that people overlook:
1. When you’re introducing yourself
2. When you’re delivering a status update
1. When introducing themselves, most people merely stop at “My name is _______.”
This is a missed opportunity to remind others of what you are working on and, moreover, why you matter.
- Instead, try saying, “My name is _______ and I am a _______ working on _______ whose goal is to _______.”
2. When delivering a status update, most people merely stop at “It’s going well!”
This is also a missed opportunity to remind others of what you are working on and, moreover, why they should care.
- Instead, try saying, “I’m working on _______ where the objective is to _______. So far, I’ve _______ (and discovered / and was surprised to find that _______). As a next step, I will _______.”
People don’t know what you know and can’t read your mind, so if you don’t share, others risk never knowing—and never giving you the credit you deserve.
Like Denis Villeneuve of Dune: Part Two, you may sometimes do everything right and still miss out on a job, promotion, or opportunity.
But the more you “exist,” the more likely others will see your potential—and the more likely they are to pull you into the jobs that don’t get posted and meetings that don’t get shared.
See you on Thursday for our “Ask Gorick Anything” of the week!
Gorick
What’s an “unspoken rule”? They’re the things that separate those who get ahead from those who stumble—and don’t know why. You can learn more about these rules in the workplace in my Wall Street Journal bestselling book called—you guessed it—The Unspoken Rules.
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Sources:
- 20 million people
- “biggest night”
- “the most prestigious awards in the entertainment industry,”
- The first Academy Awards took place in May of 1929—nearly 1 century ago.
- The data doesn’t lie
- Recency Bias in Oscar Nominees
- “tendency to place greater weight”
- the items at the end of a list
- blockbuster epics
- “Oscar Bait.”
- “Dump Months”
- often 50% of production costs and sometimes more
- “left the actors unable to promote the film.”
- sparking—you guessed it—cries of recency bias
