As a shining beacon of what is hip, MTV has a responsibility during its movie awards to highlight the most popular films of the year. This is in stark contrast to the priorities of higher brow award shows such as the Oscars, for which artistic achievement is placed on the highest pedestal. This is not to say that these two goals need be mutually exclusive; indeed, since the first MTV Movie Awards was broadcast in 1992, the “Best Film” has agreed with the Academy Award winning best film three times (1997′s Titanic, 2000′s Gladiator, and 2003′s Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King). Even so, a quick glance at the nominated films from these two awards shows each year reveals a fairly small overlap, in general. But if MTV’s goal is to prop up films from an angle focused more on pop culture, it is natural to ask how good of a job they do.

Delicious metal popcorn. (Photo: Jason McDonald/MTV)

This question begets another one: how can we best measure a film’s popularity? My first thought was to consider the rankings on IMDB. There, users can give any film a score from 1 to 10; as a prime example of a range voting system, this seemed like a good place to measure the public’s reception of a film.

The results were mixed. With this metric, comparing the 20 years that both awards shows have been around, the MTV best film scored higher than the Oscar winning best film only 5 times. Oscar trumped 12 times, and the two awards tied three times. The trend is also worth mentioning – after 5 consecutive years of beating or tying the Oscars in IMDB score from 1999-2003, the Oscar winning film has bested the MTV winning film ever since. The disparity has become even larger in recent years (I call this the Twilight effect, as the Twilight films have won best film at the MTV awards for three years running). Here’s a graph of the scores over time (the list of MTV Best film winners is here; Oscar winners can be found here):

While you may argue there isn’t enough data here to draw much of a strong conclusion, the recent trend is fairly convincing. By this metric, it seems like Oscar winning films, at least over the past few years, seem to have been more popular.

Rather than looking at only the winner, though, you might expect to get a better sense of the popularity of films on display by looking at all nominated films, rather than just the winners. If we take the average IMDB score for all nominated best films at each awards show, rather than just the winning film, we get the following picture:

It’s come close, but the average IMDB score of MTV nominated films has never been greater than the average IMDB score for Oscar nominated films. We see the Twilight effect among the averages as well, though it was dampened somewhat this year due to the inclusion of critical darlings Inception, The Social Network, and Black Swan on the MTV nominee list.

“Hold up,” you may be thinking to yourself, “this is all a bunch of hooey.” You may think that IMDB scores are not a very good measure of a film’s popularity. It may be quite likely that IMDB scores are biased towards those same features of a film that make it more likely for Oscar consideration. Perhaps the type of person who goes onto the website to rate films is more likely to be somewhat of a connoisseur, and therefore the tastes reflected by the IMDB community are more likely to reflect the tastes of the Oscars. At the very least, it seems likely that teenage girls are not voting on the website in droves; how else can one explain the Twilight series’ limp average of only 4.9?

What else can we use to measure a film’s popularity? Well, to return to teenage girls, they don’t show their support for the Twilight series by rating it highly on the internet. They show their support by going out and seeing the movie multiple times. So perhaps we should look at box office receipts rather than IMDB score (and, of course, by picking sides in the bitter feud between Edward and Jacob). What sort of picture do we see in this case?

If we only consider the winning film from each awards show, the data looks like this (I’m only considering US box office numbers here):

(I’ve cut the graph so that you can’t see the leap in 1997, when Titanic took top prize at both shows.) Things look a little more erratic, but if you look closely, you’ll see that the MTV award winner has taken in more money than its Oscar winning counterpart 14 times out of 20. The Oscar has favored the larger cash cow only three times.

As with the IMDB rankings, we can try to smooth things out by looking at the average box office returns among nominees, rather than just returns for the winner. This yields the following graph:

These numbers aren’t adjusted for inflation, which may explain in part the growth trend (2009 numbers are bumped up because of Avatar, as well). I’m less interested in the actual numbers than I am the difference between the two graphs. And here we see, in contrast to the IMDB case, that the roles of the two awards shows have flipped. While the average IMDB score of Oscar nominees has always been higher than the average IMDB score of MTV nominees, the average box office return of MTV nominees has always been higher than the average box office return of Oscar nominees.

To return to the original question: do the MTV movie awards highlight more popular films than the Oscars? Well, it depends on how you define “popular.” If popular means highly rated, the claim is somewhat dubious. But if popularity is measured by the almighty dollar, then this seems like a fair conclusion to draw. Whatever your line of thinking, though, I’m fairly confident that current trends will continue, at least until the last of the Twilight films has exited theaters.

Of course, the success of this franchise should not be viewed in isolation, but as just a part of the larger vampire pop culture renaissance.  HBO’s True Blood, also based on a book series involving a girl who knocks boots with the undead, is going strong into its third season this summer, and the CW’s Vampire Diaries will return for a second season this fall.  And just when I thought the market for vampire-themed programming had become saturated, ABC premiered its own summer show featuring blood suckers called The Gates.  Clearly there is a trend here, with the ever-growing popularity of the vampire at its center.  No doubt Eddie Murphy is rolling in his undead grave for not releasing Vampire in Brooklyn 10 years later.

While there are many words that could be used to describe these shows and movies that place supernatural love triangles at their center, “realistic” is not one of them.  Nevertheless, there are a handful of people who have taken a critical eye to the vampire phenomenon and have used mathematical models to gain insight into how the populations of such creatures might behave in real life.  Just like the fights between Team Edward and Team Jacob, however, the debate over whether vampires could actually exist rages on.

Not long ago, an article went around the web purporting that a team of physicists had proven that vampires could not exist.  The physicists, Costas Efthimiou and Sohang Gandhi, posted a paper to the arXiv in which they purport to use physics to dispel pop culture portrayals of ghosts and zombies, in addition to vampires.  Their argument for debunking vampires rests on the following assumptions:

1. When a vampire bites a human, that human becomes a vampire (we will return to this assumption later).
2. Vampires need to feed on a human once every month (a conservative estimate when compared to what popular culture would have us believe).
3. Assume the first vampire came into existence in 1600, when the human population was roughly 500 million.
4. Ignore human mortality rates due to other factors, and ignore human birth rates as well.

With these hypotheses, they show that vampires would wipe out humanity in just 2 1/2 years.  In fact, no matter the size of the initial human population, their model will lead to humanity’s extinction in a short amount of time.  This is true even if we assume a more conservative estimate on the length of time vampires can go between feedings.

The reason is simple.  Using their model, the first vampire will feed after one month, creating a new vampire (by assumption 1).  After 2 months, those 2 vampires will each feed, giving us a total of 4 vampires.  After 3 months, those 4 vampires will feed, giving us a total of 8 vampires.  The pattern continues – after n months, the vampire population will be 2ⁿ. In other words, the population of vampires will grow exponentially.  Moreover, because of the assumption on the birth and mortality rate of mankind, we see that as the population of vampires grows exponentially, so too must the population of humans shrink exponentially.  This means that at some point (sooner than you might think), humans would be wiped out.

The careful reader, however, will note a number of problems with this analysis.  For one, ignoring the birth rate of humans means that the model’s date of extinction is premature.  However, Efthimiou and Gandhi point out that even if we include the birth rate, that rate would not be high enough to counteract the explosion in the vampire population.  A more serious flaw, however, is in not considering the mortality rate of the vampires themselves.  After all, once people realize there are vampires in their midst, wouldn’t they fight back, or at least defend themselves so that not all of the vampires could feed?  Assuming that every vampire would be able to feed whenever necessary seems unrealistic.

What’s more, assuming that vampires can only satisfy themselves with human blood, it seems unreasonable to assume that vampires would feast so carelessly, without regard to the diminishing supply of their food.  If vampires killed all humans, they in turn would die (again), and so it seems reasonable to expect that vampires would apply a better strategy, one in which they kept the human species afloat so that they could themselves continue to exist.  Just ask Ethan Hawke.

In a brief article for Math Horizons, mathematician Dino Sejdinovic addresses these issues and highlights an article from 1982 that modeled the vampire outbreak more realistically, by including the human birth rate and vampire mortality rate.  In doing so, the mathematics becomes less fit for a general audience, but it also gives us a more interesting picture – regardless of the collective desire for human blood, vampires can act in a way that the ratio of vampires to humans reaches an eventual equilibrium.  In other words, it doesn’t seem right to throw out the idea of vampires based on purely mathematical arguments.

Interestingly, though, all of these analyses rest upon assumption (1), which states that humans always become vampires once bitten.  In the modern incarnation of these creatures, however, this assumption no longer appears to be valid.  For example, in both True Blood and The Vampire Diaries, the process of turning into a vampire requires consent (I guess it’s more romantic that way); not only must the vampire drink the human’s blood, but the human must also drink the vampire’s blood.  In this case, it is possible for vampires to satiate themselves without killing humans (provided the vampires can show enough restraint) or increasing their own population.

There also appear to be rules governing population control in vampire communities.  For example, in an episode of True Blood, one vampire is tasked with creating a new vampire as penance for murdering one of his own kind.  Are such rules keeping the population stable widespread?  How might such rules, in conjunction with a weakening of assumption (1), alter the vampires’ optimal strategy?  I will leave it to the curious reader to discover the answer.