How we traded one King of Pop for 10 best-picture nominees.

Which brings us to the Oscars. From the vantage point of the early '80s, if you were trying to predict the future of music or movies, it is very likely you would have assumed that it would be dominated by a very few hitti di tutti hitti. You might well have bet with Robert Frank that each year, a single mega-hit would become more important.

That bet, though, would have been wrong. As it happens, the early '80s were the apex of the mega-hit era. Thriller, of course, was the ultimate example. But the movies—whose box-office take you can easily chart over the years, thanks to Box Office Mojo—give you a deeper view. In 2008, The Dark Knight was the clear winner, with a total gross of $533 million in ticket sales, but the next two movies, Iron Man and the latest Indiana Jones installment, each did close to $320 million of business. In 2007, four movies ran almost neck and neck, each with a gross of more than $300 million; the top earner, Spider Man 3, was just a shade ahead of Shrek the Third. The single hit has given way to the multi-blockbuster summer.

This pattern holds generally true down the line: In 1982, only 19 other movies did a mere 10 percent of the business of E.T.; in 1983, only 27 movies had one-tenth the ticket sales of Return of the Jedi. Compare that with today: In 2006, 70 movies came in at 10 percent of the sales of the top grosser, Pirates of the Caribbean; in 2007, 78 movies hit that mark compared with Spider Man 3; and in 2008, 53 other movies had 10 percent of the sales of The Dark Knight. The falloff from the top to the rest hasn't gotten steeper, as the winner-takes-all folks would predict, but more gradual.

Look over this and you can see where the Motion Picture Academy is coming from. The common thinking is that the powers in Hollywood haven't exactly been thrilled to see the awards dominated by smaller movies like Slumdog Millionaire and No Country for Old Men while Hollywood's favorite children, such as The Dark Knight, go ignored. Clearly this is true. But it's not only a question of the blockbusters versus the indies. It's also a lot more movies—blockbusters fighting one another and mid-tier movies moving closer to the blockbuster ranks—clustering in the zone of Academy-worthiness.

You can think of that, if we have to coin a phrase (and everybody does, don't they?), as the "Fat Middle." Or maybe it's somewhere above the middle. Call it the "Bulging Upper Body" of cultural production. Or, if you want to use Chris Anderson's head/tail distinction, the "Swelling Head." You can go ahead and use any lingo you want. If you're mathematically minded and want to talk curves, you can even say the "Flat Head." The exact picture you draw of this will depend on cutting up a lot more data, but in general the mega-blockbusters of the early '80s have given way to a bigger clump of competitors jostling in the upper decks of hit, close-to-hits, could-be-hits, and near-hits.

So does this mean that The Winner Take All Society is all wrong and The Long Tail is right? Well, not really. A few winners are not getting closer to taking all, but there could still be a sharp drop-off further down the economic ladder, lending some truth to some of Frank's points about expanding inequality. And while the gap from first place to second and second to tenth and tenth to hundredth appears to have narrowed since the early '80s, supporting Anderson's thesis, all the movement we're looking at is still at the top of the ladder. The top ranks might be more crowded, but the growth in the fat upper-middle doesn't guarantee that the tail is growing longer and fatter as well (though it does make it likely).