The Oscars are fast approaching on April 25th. Once a film is nominated, it goes down in history. And if it wins? That’s a stamp of approval that increases viewership even more. In fact, a survey we conducted found that 46% of people are more likely to watch a film if it has been nominated. 

The team at USDish wanted to find out which were the most nominated films of all time. We analyzed every movie that has been nominated by these five prestigious awarding bodies: 

• Oscars

• Golden Globes

• BAFTA

• Critics' Choice Awards

• SAG Awards

After our team analyzed 57,960 data points, we came up with the Most Award-Nominated Films of All Time.

The 2020 film that made our list was Netlfix's Mank, with 35 nominations! In fact, it's the first streaming service film to make it into our list. Mank has yet to win an award and we’ll keep a close eye on the BAFTA happening on April 11th and the Academy Awards on April 25th to see the outcome.

During our research, we found the following interesting points:

• Leonardo DiCaprio and Emma Stone are each in 3 of the 20 movies listed.

• The oldest film on the list is The English Patient (1994) while the newest is Mank (2020).

• 85% of the films on the list were made in the 2000s, and 60% were made in the 2010s.

• Tom Hooper directed two films that made it to the top 20: Les Misérables (2012) and The King’s Speech (2010).

• Mank (2020) is the first Netflix and streaming service film to make our list.

• La La Land (2016) won 58% of the awards it was nominated for, making it the film that won the highest percentage of awards.

• On average, movies win 35% of nominations.

How many of these films have your readers seen? Do they agree with the results?

Methodology

In order to figure out which films received the most nominations, the USDish team gathered data from five different awards organizations: the Academy Awards (Oscars), the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA), and the Critics Choice Awards. The information and conclusions in this article are based solely on data from only these five organizations.

Here’s how that data came into play: 

• Our researchers analyzed a total of 57,960 data points to determine which films received the most award nominations up to the year 2019.

• After cleaning the data up a bit, we separated it by category (Movies, Awards, Total Nominations, Total Wins, Percent of Awards Won), then made an overall count of which films had gathered the most award nominations based on our criteria.

• Note: It is possible that certain films on the list may have accumulated more award nominations, as there exist several more prestigious awards organizations outside of the ones we chose. However, these organizations often have different types of movies in their nomination pools than those honored by our core five (e.g. Sundance awards small budget, independent films before they’re acquired by a production company). Inconsistencies in the data may have resulted, which is why we gathered data from only five major organizations.