Numlock Awards: How Diane Warren became the biggest loser in Oscar history

Incredibly popular among one crowd, not popular enough among another.

Numlock Awards is your one-stop awards season newsletter. Join Walt Hickey and Michael Domanico as they break down the math behind the Oscars and the best narratives going into film’s biggest night. We have a special guest this week, the brilliant Nathaniel Rakich!

Hi, all! Nathaniel Rakich here — former FiveThirtyEight colleague of Walt’s and longtime reader of this newsletter. Thanks to Walt and Michael for letting me contribute.

I’ve been an inveterate Oscars junkie for a while, and one thing that has always fascinated me is the people who keep getting nominated without winning. Everyone says it’s an honor just to be nominated, but it’s got to get old getting nominated, dressing up for the big night, and then hearing someone else’s name get called again and again, right?

Now here’s a trivia question for you. Who has suffered through that indignity the most? In other words, who has the most Oscar nominations without a win?

It’s not Glenn Close (who’s famously 0 for 8). It’s not Bradley Cooper (0 for 12). It’s not Paul Thomas Anderson, who has now been nominated 14 times and will probably score his first win this year.

Give up?

It’s songwriter Diane Warren, who is nominated this year for the 17th time but has never won a competitive Oscar.¹

Warren made her bones early in her career writing power ballads for a series of late ’90s/early 2000s blockbusters, like Con-Air (“How Do I Live”), Armageddon (“I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”), and Pearl Harbor (“There You’ll Be”). But since then, she’s rattled off an incredible streak: She’s been nominated for Best Original Song in 11 of the last 12 years, including the last nine in a row, mostly for movies that no one has ever heard of.

I mean, seriously. Four Good Days made $864,091 worldwide. Flamin’ Hot is a movie about the invention of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. And Warren’s nomination this year comes for the movie Diane Warren: Relentless, which is, yes, a documentary about Diane Warren.

It’s hard enough to get nominated for one Oscar. How does a person get nominated for 17 — and not win a single one?² I suspect it has to do with the Academy’s voting system.

In most cases, nominees for a specific category are determined by a vote of the specific branch of the Academy that’s associated with that category: the Cinematographers Branch for Best Cinematography, the Sound Branch for Best Sound, etc. The nominees for Best Original Song are determined by the Music Branch, which this year has 421 voting members. Since the five songs that get the most votes are nominated, 71 votes are enough to guarantee a nomination.

When you have a voting pool that’s that small — and presumably pretty tight-knit — what’s supposed to be an election on the merits can turn into a popularity contest. My theory is basically that there are somewhere around 71 members of the Music Branch of the Academy who love Diane Warren, think it’s a crime that she’s never won an Oscar, and will vote for her no matter what.

But after that, it’s out of the Music Branch’s hands. Oscar winners are determined by a vote of the full Academy: this year, 10,136 people. So at least 2,028 people³, and probably many more, would have to vote for “Dear Me” to get Warren her long-awaited win this year — the vast majority of whom would have to be from outside the Music Branch. And I just don’t think the rest of the Academy cares that much about Warren, if they’re even familiar with her run of bad luck in the first place.

You’d think that being the biggest loser in Oscar history would garner quite a few sympathy votes. But that doesn’t seem to be the case. As I’ve written previously, people who have lost a lot at the Oscars are actually less likely to win going forward. People with at least 10 previous Oscar nominations and zero wins have won their next nomination only 8% of the time (7 out of 89 nominations). That’s significantly worse than if the winners had just been determined by chance (in categories with five nominees, a 20% chance).

Notice a few things about this list. First, a couple specific types of Academy members are overrepresented. Seven of the 22 names are composers and/or songwriters; six are sound designers.

That’s probably not a coincidence. There seems to be something about these professions that lends itself to getting nominated for lots of Oscars without winning. It could be that these professions are dominated by a small number of big names; it could be that the Music Branch and Sound Branch are particularly tight-knit⁴.

But that would explain only why they keep getting nominated, not why they keep losing. Production designers also get nominated for a lot of Oscars (six of the 16 people with the most Oscar nominations in history are production designers), but there are only two production designers on our list.

My theory is that working on the audio side of film — a predominantly visual medium — lends itself to anonymity, which means people don’t notice when these professionals rack up googobs of Oscar nominations but don’t win. That brings me to the second thing to notice about the list: It has very few household names. Bradley Cooper is the only actor on it, and Federico Fellini and Anderson are the only directors.

Directors and especially actors tend not to amass that many nominations in the first place, but when they do, they tend to get the gold eventually. Only 16 actors or directors in history have made it to seven career nominations without a win — and, of the 12 who were nominated an eighth time, five won (a 42% win rate)!⁵ That suggests that there is a sympathy vote for people who have repeatedly left the Oscars empty-handed, but only if you’re famous.

For everyone else, though, the Academy’s setup of having one electorate for nominations — the primary, if you will — and another electorate for the general election can trap you in Oscars purgatory: good enough to get nominated, but not flashy enough to win.

I’m not sure there’s anything to be done about this. No voting system is perfect: having the entire Academy vote on nominations would probably lead to some uninformed choices, and having only branches vote for the winners of their categories might encourage cronyism. I’m also not sure how I feel about voting for someone just because they’re “due,” as a type of lifetime achievement award, even if their particular work in a given year isn’t the strongest. But it’s hard not to feel for people like Warren, who are clearly very talented and respected by their peers.

Thankfully, there may be a silver lining to all this. The third thing to notice about our list is that the three names at the top — the three people who started their career with the most losses in Oscar history — all eventually got their statuette. It’s a small sample size, but that at least suggests that there could be a critical mass of Oscar nominations (around 20) that will earn the sympathy of the Academy at large, no matter how anonymous you are.

So maybe all Warren needs to snag that elusive first competitive Oscar is to score a few more nominations. At the rate she’s going, she’ll do that by 2029 without breaking a sweat.

Huge thanks to Nathaniel for contributing to the newsletter this year, I am a huge fan of his work. You can find him on Bluesky and on Twitter and follow his political work over at Votebeat, where he’s the managing editor. If you’d like more of this kind of thing, shoot us an email and say so, and comment below on your biggest Oscar snub.

1. Warren was awarded an honorary Oscar in 2022 — but that’s not the same thing as getting nominated and winning. The Oscars is a blood sport, folks.

2. Warren hasn’t lost this year yet, of course — but oddsmakers give her little shot. “Golden” from KPop Demon Hunters has an 87% chance to win on Gold Derby.

3. While the Academy uses ranked-choice voting to anoint a Best Picture, the winners in all the other categories are determined by a simple plurality vote.

4. A recent Oscars mini-scandal illustrates this nicely. Sound designer Greg P. Russell actually should be tied with Warren with 17 nominations without a win. But his nomination for mixing 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016) was rescinded after he violated Academy rules by personally calling members of the Sound Branch to campaign for a nomination.

5. Those five names: Martin Scorsese, Warren Beatty, Geraldine Page, Wes Anderson, and Paul Newman.