To view the image, go to http://movies.nytimes.com/pages/movies/index.html and click on “That’s Gratitude For Ya” under Multimedia. If the image has been removed, go to http://s7.photobucket.com/albums/y265/Berner6/.

The New York Times printed the above image on the front page of its Arts Section, Tuesday, February 27. The image depicts a directed graph compiled from this years Oscar acceptance speeches. There are two types of nodes. The twenty-four nodes with pictures represent an Oscar award winner; the twenty-five nodes with only text represent all of the people, places, and things that the winners thanked in their speeches. The edges of the graph are directed, originating from an Oscar winner node and terminating on a thanked node.

In analyzing the graph, the way nodes are connected, and the way nodes are organized, it is clear that without even reading who or what was thanked, there are distinctive types of nodes thanked. Twenty thanked nodes lie on the fringe of the graph, none totaling more than four terminating edges (“advisers and financers” on the middle right). One node lies closer to the middle and has seven terminating edges (“Everyone who helped make film” towards the bottom right). The group of nodes that stand out the most are the five in the middle, which range from thirteen to eighteen terminating edges. As a group, those five nodes more than double the number of speech mentions the other twenty nodes had (80 to 38).

One way to interpret the significance of a smaller group of thanked nodes dominating the rest is that those five have proportionally more importance to the movie and award winner. This seems to generally hold true, except for thanked nodes on the fringe, such as the film’s inspiration and financers, without which the film probably never would have existed and become successful. Also, family, a highly thanked node in the middle, is not inherently important to the success of a film, which contradicts the first interpretation. Another interpretation is that the five nodes in the middle represent high-profile people and things, such as the director of the film and the Academy itself, and thus received vastly more recognition at such a high-profile event like the Oscars.