Where you live might predict which movie you hope will win Best Picture at the Oscars

(Image credit: Chris Delmas/Getty Images)

published 25 February 2017

After sweeping the Golden Globes, La La Land is the heavy favorite for Best Picture — not to mention its 13 other nominations, the most for any film this year — at Sunday's 2017 Academy Awards ceremony. Still, there are seven other Best Picture nominees, and an intriguing analysis by The New York Times finds their support is far from uniform across the United States.

The rationale behind some of the movies' geographic popularity — which the Times mapped using location data on each film's Facebook likes — is more obvious than others. For example, Hidden Figures, which tells the true story of black women's oft-ignored contributions to the space race, was most popular in the Black Belt region of the South, which has a large African-American population. Likewise, Hacksaw Ridge, another true story, was a big hit in the Appalachian area from which its main character hails.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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