The 88th Academy Awards will be handed out Sunday night, and while much of the focus of this year’s Oscars has been be on complaints about lack of black actors being nominated, something else is able to celebrate a lot of attention from the Academy.
Wall Street.
That’s because two of the most nominated films deal with business themes.
The Big Short—about money-hungry Wall Streeters making a fortune off of the housing collapse—has collared many of the top nods, including Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor in Christian Bale, Best Directing, and Best Film Editing. Meantime, the biopic about Apple (AAPL) co-founder Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs, sees Michael Fassbender up for Best Actor and Kate Winslet for Best Supporting Actress.
Yahoo Finance Editor-in-Chief Andy Serwer says Hollywood has done pretty well over the years with movies tied to business.
“Think about Wall Street, Oliver Stone’s movie,” he notes. "It’s a Wonderful Life—we think of that as a Christmas move. It’s really a business movie. And Citizen Kane is really a business movie. There are really dozens and dozens of movies that have been about business and have done well.”
Serwer notes the movie industry views the world of business in two different lights.
“Hollywood has a love-hate relationship with business,” he argues. “It needs the money, but a lot of times it needs villains, and a lot of times business fits the bill. And it does that very, very well.”
However, Serwer believes the business bad guy theme is not always black and white.
“When you think of Wall Street, the Michael Douglas character, Gordon Gekko, is supposed to be a villain,” he explains. “But a lot of people secretly liked him. So it’s complicated that way.”
Serwer adds that when it comes to demand for business-themed films, the little screen may be stealing some of the thunder from the big screen, as we’ve seen from the Bernie Madoff mini-series.
“This is the new golden age of TV,” he says. “Besides Madoff, you have Billionaires and Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is in vogue right now because it’s part of popular culture. So you’ve got that on the one side and Wall Street villains on the other—never going to get tired of that stuff!"
The Academy Awards will be broadcast live at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT Sunday on Disney’s (DIS) ABC Network.