Oscar Really Does Spin Box Office Gold

By Stephen M. Silverman

04/01/2002 at 10:29 AM EST

Just as things were getting nasty with the alleged smear campaign aimed at "A Beautiful Mind," news reports indicated that winning the Best Picture Oscar could mean as much as an extra $50 million at the box office for the Ron Howard film. "Mind" won that top honor, and this past weekend saw a healthy hike at the ticket windows for it and some other recent Oscar-winning movies, reports Variety. "Mind," starring Russell Crowe (beat out for Best Actor by Denzel Washington for "Training Day") as schizophrenic math genius John Nash, won four Oscars in all (including those for directing, writing and Supporting Actress Jennifer Connelly). The awards are credited with earning the picture $4 million on 1,560 of the nation's screens last weekend (the movie's 15th week since its premiere). It slipped only 1 percent from its previous weekend tally, and "that is spectacular performance for a movie that's been in theaters for that long," Dan Marks, vice president of box office tracking service ACNielsen EDI, told the trade paper. "Monster's Ball" also was decidedly spurred on by Halle Berry's historic win as the first African-American to be named Best Actress. That movie's business jumped 30 percent from the previous weekend, to earn $2.1 million on 675 screens (137 more screens than were showing the movie the weekend before). "It's a very nice uptick, and it looks like we're headed to $30 million," its distributor's president told Variety.