When Oscar Nominations Make Audiences Harsher

The Academy Awards ceremony is around the corner and already we know the frontrunners. The nominees, announced on January 22, feature Ryan Coogler’s Sinners - leading the field with a record 16 nominations, the most ever for a single film - followed by Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another with 13. Other major Best Picture contenders include Frankenstein, Hamnet, Marty Supreme, Sentimental Value, The Secret Agent, and Train Dreams. Undoubtedly a boost for the nominees. But what does it do for the movie-goers? Awards, certifications, and nominations are designed to reassure audiences about quality. However, what if the very signals meant to elevate a product also make people harder to please? Using movie ratings around Academy Award nominations over a period of 24 years, professors Michelangelo Rossi and Felix Schleef examined an overlooked downside of “quality disclosures”: they can raise expectations so much that satisfaction falls when the experience doesn’t match the new benchmark.

Rossi’s entry point into his decade of research on Oscar nominations is disarmingly personal. In a 45-minute Breakthroughs podcast, he described how it all began while watching La La Land with his future wife. The movie’s 14 Oscar nominations – equaling the all-time record – had created a heavy awards buzz. Yet, both felt a mismatch between what they expected and what they experienced. Rossi then realized a nomination can pull in viewers who wouldn’t otherwise choose the film and decided to further investigate. 

Fast-forward eight years to his 2025 working paper which starts with a simple question: do quality disclosures function as positive signals for consumers? To answer, he and Schleef  analyzed nominations by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) from 1995 to 2019 in key categories, for a total of 427 nominated films present in MovieLens. 

The researchers discovered that, at the descriptive level, nominated films show higher average ratings before nominations than after (3.841 vs 3.697 for all available ratings), alongside a large surge in rating volume after nominations. If these nominees do indeed push expectations upward, the authors noted that they can also generate disappointment at the moment of consumption. Awards exist in many industries, but movies offer an interesting setting to study this effect because the underlying quality of the film is fixed. In this setting, nominations can change how viewers experience a movie, even though nothing about the movie itself has changed.

A central challenge for Rossi and Schleef, respectively academics from HEC Paris and Hi! Paris, is separating two forces. The first force is the “selection effects” which is driven by the difference in the types of movie-goers who go see a movie before and after the nomination. They name the second force the “disappointment effect” to describe the effect that nominations have on the on movie-goers holding their type – their tastes and preferences constant.

To isolate disappointment, the authors developed a new approach: by training an algorithm on all the movies the users watched before the nominations, they can identify groups of users that receive very similar recommendations and therefore have similar tastes. In such a group of users, the difference between the rating of the user that has watched the movie before the nomination and the rating of the user that has watched it after the nomination then identifies the disappointment effect. 

Across MovieLens ratings surrounding nominations (1995–2019), the analysis finds a significant post-nomination decline in ratings for nominated films relative to non-nominated films. And, for Rossi, the intervening seven years since his data stopped is unlikely to change the outcome. “I’ve not observed any changes between 2019 and the present, although I would bet… the disappointment effect is bigger now,” he said. He added that a fall in ratings does appear to be larger in earlier decades and may have softened as the Oscars’ cultural position evolved.”

Looking at MovieLens ratings around Oscar nominations between 1995 and 2019, the analysis shows a clear post-nomination drop in ratings for nominated films compared with those that were not nominated. The effect appears to have been strongest in the 1990s and has gradually softened over time, reflecting the Oscars’ shifting cultural role. While the data stop in 2019, there is little to suggest that the underlying pattern has dramatically changed since. The disruption caused by COVID-19, from altered release schedules to changing viewing habits, may have influenced audience reactions in more recent years, but further data would be needed to assess its impact.

The authors document a negative effect of nominations on ratings that is equivalent to 0.144 stars. While this might seem small, consumers interpret 4.9 stars differently than 4.5, and 4.2 stars differently than 3.9 – however small these differences seem, they have the power to significantly shape users’ decisions, especially since users are able to consider and compare many movies with very similar ratings. Understanding this, we see why even a moderate disappointment effect could be important. In addition, this difference in ratings does not only affect choices through the average rating that users see when they make decisions – they may impact recommendation algorithms, and thereby the likelihood a user discovers the movie at all.

The disappointment effect is primarily driven by less experienced users, those who have posted relatively few ratings. “It comes from people who go to the theater once a year… they may rely on the nomination as an external signal of what to watch,” explained Rossi.

His paper interprets this as consistent with the idea that less experienced users are more likely to rely on awards as quality signals, and therefore more likely to be influenced (and disappointed) when expectations rise.

The study’s message is uncomfortable but useful for leaders. It could be said that signals of quality don’t just attract attention, they shape the yardstick people use to evaluate the experience. In a world saturated with rankings, awards, and “best-of” labels, the research highlights an actionable risk: if recognition pushes expectations beyond what the experience can deliver, satisfaction may fall, especially among audiences who rely most heavily on signals when forming judgments. That logic travels well beyond film, Rossi claims: ratings, rankings, “best workplace” badges, and top-tier certifications can all act as expectation escalators.

As the HEC academic in the marketing department warned at the end of our interview, the point is not that recognitions are inherently harmful. But they can create a predictable downside if organizations don’t manage expectations and fit.