And the Oscar goes to ... a movie most people have seen

NEW YORK (AP) — The Oscars are poised to do something on Sunday that they haven’t done in a very long time: Hand its top award to a blockbuster.

After years of favoring smaller movies like “The Shape of Water” and “Nomadland, ” the clear best-picture favorite “Oppenheimer” — with just shy of $1 billion in tickets sold — is steam rolling toward the kind of big-movie dominance the Academy Awards hasn’t seen in two decades.

You have to go back to Ben Affleck’s “Argo” (2012) to find a best-picture winner that’s grossed more than $100 million domestically. Academy voters’ tastes have instead largely favored smaller independently produced films like “Moonlight,” “Nomadland” and “CODA,” an Apple release with zero reported box office in North America. Last year, the scrappy, distinctly un-Oscar-like indie “Everything Everywhere All at Once” played the role of awards-season underdog until it became an unlikely Academy Awards heavyweight.

But even “Argo,” which walked away with three Oscars after grossing $232.3 million worldwide on a $44.5 million budget, isn’t much of a corollary to “Oppenheimer.” For that, you need to rewind to the 2004 Oscars, where Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” — a $1.16 billion smash — took home 11 Oscars. That’s more the kind of wall-to-wall sweep expected Sunday for Christopher Nolan’s J. Robert Oppenheimer biopic.