• DOWNLOAD SMARTMONEY S INVESTOR S SCORECARD FOR THE OSCARS HERE.

Sunday will be an important night for some of Hollywood s biggest names, with Meryl Streep, James Cameron, Sandra Bullock, Quentin Tarantino and others waiting to see who takes home a statuette. But there s more than just prestige at stake. In 2009, moviegoers shelled out a record $10 billion for tickets, up more than 10% from 2008. For the companies that produced and distributed this year s nominees, winning an Academy Award obviously can add millions of dollars to the bottom line just as losing one can kill a film s momentum.

If Sandra Bullock takes home the Best Actress Oscar for The Blind Side, for example, it will be a victory for Time Warner (TWX), the parent company of Warner Bros. One of this year s front-runners for Best Picture, Avatar, is a box-office giant with a major publicly traded media company, News Corp. behind it (SmartMoney is owned by News Corp. s Dow Jones unit.). Walt Disney has both The Princess and the Frog and Pixar s Up in the running for Best Animated Feature.

What winning an Academy Award really means for the companies behind the nominees.

So forget about Meryl (she s already got two) how much would a Blind Side Best Picture win mean for Time Warner? The answer: more than $17 million. That is the average amount an Academy Award boosts the Best Picture s box office, according to research by Randy Nelson, a professor of economics and finance at Colby College and co-author of the 2001 paper, What s an Oscar Worth? In fact, in the four weeks after the awards ceremony, a Best Picture win will typically produce a 245% increase in box-office revenue, according to Nelson s research. A Best Actor or Best Actress award will also produce a noticeable bump, and a supporting actor a slighter one. If you ve invested in a company that brings home a Best Sound Mixing statuette, probably the best you can hope for is that it will look nice on a shelf in the boardroom.

The box-office boost from a win is greater for smaller films. The July 1998 film Shakespeare in Love had only made $3.6 million by the end of that year, but it went on to make a total roughly $100 million after it won Best Picture. That success demonstrated how much an Oscar win can help a small film reach a larger audience and led to an indie takeover of the Academy Awards, says Gabriel Rossman, a professor of economic sociology at UCLA. The independents had a lot to gain by taking over the Oscars but the Oscars had a lot to lose, he says. Ratings for the ceremony itself declined because the nominated films weren t very popular. The drop led organizers to expand the Best Picture category this year to include 10 films in hopes some of them would draw mainstream audiences, he says.

Because there are twice as many Best Picture nominees as usual this year, the financial importance of that category has likely increased, Nelson says. Films nominated in bigger categories typically crowd best supporting actor contenders out of theaters, and with twice as many Best Picture nominees, the benefit of even a Best Actor nod may have decreased. If you re just a small film, and the only thing you ve got is a Best Supporting Actor or Actress, I would think that s not really going to help you at all, Nelson says.

For major media companies, an Oscar-winner may be part of a successful slate of films, but one movie won t make or break the bottom line by itself. Because the financial success or failure of any one movie is extremely difficult to predict, large entertainment companies manage their movie divisions as a portfolio, focusing on successful franchises like the Harry Potter films to generate more reliable revenues, says Christopher Marangi, an analyst with Gabelli & Company. I watch the Oscars as a fan, not an analyst, Marangi says.

To help you follow along on Sunday night, SmartMoney.com has created an investor s scorecard for the Academy Awards. Click here to download it and track which media companies come out of this year s ceremony winners. Here are the companies behind some of this year s major nominees:

Images: Disney, Lions Gate, News Corp., Sony, Time Warner and Viacom

• Nominee:

  Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire

• Categories:

  Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Directing, Film Editing, Adapted Screenplay, Best Picture

In a typical year, Lions Gate releases about 18 to 20 films, but the company will release just 10 or 12 films in fiscal 2010. Multiple nominee Precious was released in the third quarter, ending Dec. 31. Theatrical revenue for the quarter was down 29% compared with the previous year, with fewer films released, although home entertainment revenue held relatively steady, leaving overall motion picture revenue down just 2%. The company has said it plans to release a larger slate of films in the upcoming fiscal year. Although a Best Picture win for Precious could give the film a boost, traders are likely more focused on activist shareholder Carl Icahn s tender offer which would increase his ownership of the company to 29.9% of outstanding common shares. Icahn s goal is to prevent the company from acquiring MGM or Miramax, according to a report by Matthew Harrigan, an analyst with Wunderlich Securities.

• Major Nominee:

  Up in the Air

• Categories:

  Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress (2), Directing, Adapted Screenplay, Best Picture

• Additional Nominees:

  The Lovely Bones, Star Trek

Viacom s total revenue for fiscal 2009 was $13.6 billion, with the Filmed Entertainment division bringing in $5.5 billion. Operating income for the company grew 24% in the fourth quarter ending Dec. 31. The company said improved profitability at Paramount Pictures was one of the factors driving its growth. The studio s strategy of producing a smaller slate of films, anchored by franchises, began to pick up momentum during the quarter, CEO Phillipe Dauman said in a statement. Recent results indicate that Paramount will no longer be a drag on Viacom s earnings going forward, but the turnaround is more about structural changes than the slate of films released, according to a report by Ben Mogil, an analyst at Thomas Weisel Partners.

• Major Nominee:

  Up

• Categories:

  Best Animated Feature Film, Original Score, Sound Editing, Original Screenplay, Best Picture

• Additional Nominees:

  The Princess and the Frog

For fiscal 2009, Walt Disney s total revenue was $36.1 billion, a 4% decline compared to the previous year, with the Studio Entertainment division seeing the sharpest drop in revenue, falling 16% to $6.1 billion. The decrease was primarily the result of a decrease in home entertainment revenue and a difficult comparison to the 2008 success of Pirates of the Carribean: At World s End. Disney owns Pixar, and the studio's films have been strong performers for the company, and this year s release of Toy Story 3 should help improve the movie division s results in 2010, according to a report from Jeffrey Thomison, an analyst at Hilliard Lyons.

• Major Nominee:

  Julie & Julia

• Category:

  Best Actress

• Additional Nominees:

  District 9, An Education, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, The Last Station, The White Ribbon

Sony (SNE) SNE () total operating revenue for the quarter ending Dec. 31 was $24.325 billion, with the Pictures division bringing in operating revenue of $2.2 billion. Sales for the division were up 16% for the quarter largely because of theatrical revenues but not from the kind of smaller films that have brought Sony Pictures Classics to the Oscars. The company cited 2012 and Michael Jackson s This is It as strong performers.

• Major Nominee:

  Avatar

• Categories:

  Art Direction, Cinematography, Directing, Film Editing, Original Score, Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, Visual Effects, Best Picture

• Additional Nominees:

  Crazy Heart, Fantastic Mr. Fox

For the six months ending Dec. 31, News Corp. s Filmed Entertainment segment brought in $715 million in operating income, nearly double the amount from the same period the previous year. That growth came largely from the record-beating success of Avatar, which has earned more than $2 billion in worldwide box office revenues. Avatar isn t the type of film that benefits noticeably from an Oscar boost, however, because everybody s probably seen it already, says UCLA s Rossman. For News Corp., home entertainment revenue typically makes up the bulk of the movie division s profits, and should continue to do so, says Gabelli & Company s Marangi.

• Major Nominee:

  The Blind Side

• Categories:

  Best Actress, Best Picture

• Additional Nominees:

  Invictus, Sherlock Holmes, documentaries

Time Warner saw revenues for 2009 decline by 3%, dragged by a decline in the Publishing and Filmed Entertainment divisions. The movie division brought in $11.1 billion for the year, out of the company s total revenue of $25.8 billion. Warner Bros. movies grossed $4 billion at the box office for the year, and the company cited Oscar nominees The Blind Side and Sherlock Holmes as strong performers, but home video dragged on the division s overall earnings. Time Warner s film division typically produces steadier revenues than other major film studios because it relies on strong franchises like Harry Potter, Marangi says. Sherlock Holmes is not in the running for Best Picture, but it could be the beginning of another strong franchise for the company, he says.