I read that an Academy Award for Best Movie is worth probably an additional $100 million in box office takings, in some cases even more... the winning movie is usually 're-released' and promoted a whole second time the week following the awards. Suddenly millions of people who never contemplated going to see 'Argo' are about to buy a ticket to watch it... including me (tomorrow I think) So film studios spend months and millions of $ lobbying members of the academy with dinners, events, freebies etc in order to simply get them to vote for their movies...they even employ phone banks full of people calling around asking "can we rely on your vote?" It's a TOTALLY 100% political process from start to finish, and anyone who thinks otherwise has zero understanding of the way the awards/Hollywood lobby system works.
I actually didn't see much in Adele as a singer UNTIL the Skyfall song got nominated, which I love, and it made me download both her albums, now I really like her a lot, so there's like $25 her and her record company now have which they wouldn't have had if it hadn't been for that movie.