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From an investor s point of view, it looked like News Corp. had the advantage going into the Academy Awards. After all, the company (which owns SmartMoney.com) produced Avatar, the highest-grossing movie in ever. But it was the little-known and privately-owned Voltage Pictures, which came away the evening s winner, with six statuettes for the Iraq drama, The Hurt Locker besting News Corp. by one Oscar.

Voltage also beat out Walt Disney, which produced the animated tale, Up, one of 10 feature films nominated for Best Picture, as well as publically-traded companies including Viacom ( Up in the Air ) and Lion s Gate (LGF) ( Precious ).

With those Oscars in hand, The Hurt Locker -- which cost just $11 million to make -- stands to profit from an increase in theatrical and home video sales. The reason? In the four weeks after the awards ceremony, a Best Picture win will typically produce a 245% increase in box-office revenue, according to a 2001 study from Randy Nelson, a professor of economics and finance at Colby College.

For example, after winning an Academy Award last year, Slumdog Millionaire more than doubled its box-office receipts, while No Country For Old Men pulled in a tidy $25 million more for its Best Picture win in 2008. But perhaps the best example of a film landing a post-Oscar boost came in 1999 when Shakespeare in Love, which only made $3.6 million by the end of 1998, went on to net roughly $100 million in total after it won Best Picture.

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What s more, since there were twice as many Best Picture nominees as usual this year, the financial import of that category has likely increased, Nelson says. Films nominated in bigger categories typically crowd lesser categories such as Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor contenders out of theaters. However, given the fact that 10 nominees filled the biggest category this year, even the higher-profile awards such as Best Actor and Actress will likely get crowded out as well, he says. Instead of trying to book the five films nominated, they will try to book the 10 -- making it harder for the films nominated for lesser awards to get an Oscar bump, says Nelson.

Although a smaller film like Precious could see a noticeable Oscar jolt as well, it depends on how widely the film was distributed before winning an Academy Award, says James Marsh, a securities analyst for Piper Jaffray in Minneapolis. Slumdog [Millionaire] was a limited release movie when it won awards. Subsequently it landed expanded distribution. The Hurt Locker should benefit like that, says Marsh. It only showed on a handful of screens domestically. The film is still playing on 274 theaters across North America, and may get rereleased in other theaters, even though it has been out for roughly 18 months. (Calls for comment regarding the rerelease of The Hurt Locker to Summit Entertainment, the film s distributor, and Voltage Pictures were not immediately returned.)

Win or not, Avatar is clearly the industry s biggest commercial success. The sci-fi epic, which cost more than $230 million to make, has already grossed more than $2.5 billion in box-office sales. Counting box-office receipts, as well as forecast sales from ancillary windows such as DVDs and rentals, profits from Avatar alone, will amount to more than $325 million for News Corp., according to Alan S. Gould, a principal at Soleil-Gould Research in New York.

But even if "Avatar" had won for Best Picture, it probably wouldn t have had much of an effect on the company s share price. I don t think winning or not winning the Oscar would make a difference to News Corp., says Gould. For a film that has grown this much already, the Academy Awards will mean very little, if anything, to the company s stock price. On Monday, News Corp. s shares closed down 0.15% to $16.71.

Walt Disney, meanwhile, got a boost of another kind from the show, notes Gould, who follows the CBS Corporation and owns stock in News Corp. While Disney took home just two awards for Up, big advertiser Apple (AAPL) aired its first commercial for the iPad during the Academy Awards. Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who is a major investor in Disney, even donned a tux for the occasion.

In addition, viewership for the evening s festivities was up compared with recent years. About 41.3 million people tuned in to Walt Disney s ABC broadcast television network s telecast on Sunday night. That figure came in far below the 55.2 million viewers who watched the Oscars in 1998 when "Titanic" was voted Best Picture. But this year s awards ceremony did level a 14% increase over the same rating for last year's telecast, when 36.3 million viewers watched "Slumdog Millionaire" receive a Best Picture statuette, according to TV ratings researcher Nielsen.