Ironman at Political Calculations refused to watch the Oscar Awards on television this past weekend. Instead, he wondered whether the least popular of the films nominated to win an Oscar would still be popular enough to out-draw the year's worst movie at the box office.
His results indicated that in most years the least-popular Oscar nominee did, in fact, outdraw the year's worst movie. Interstingly, though, the mean box-office revenues were nearly equal between the two groups, and the reason was that there were a few really bad movies that were high-gross films. The standard deviation of the box office revenue for the bad films was much higher than for the least-popular Oscar nominees over the years.
Ironman relates that result to the observation that while men have about the same abilities as women on average, the standard deviations of men's abilities are much higher than for women. To see his analysis be sure to read the whole thing.