MOVIES - Aug. 22, 1991

Survey Says: Movies that come out late in the year stand a better chance of winning an Oscar, according to an academic study done in St. Petersburg, Fla., that nicknames the phenomenon “The EberSisk Effect.” Eckerd College associate psychology professor Mark Davis named the phenomenon after movie critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. The researchers plotted the release dates of 550 movies from 1972, 1977, 1979 and 1985 on a graph and compared them to the number of nominations the films received--finding that the big Oscar winners were the films released late in the year. Davis presented the findings this week at the American Psychological Assn. conference in San Francisco.