Have heard this question raised recently, both on Reddit and on the wonderful Big Picture podcast. To clarify: the theory is that Oscar nominations are increasingly clustered around a few juggernauts, with movies like Oppenheimer (13 nominations) and Poor Things (11 nominations) serving as the latest examples.
We can use (surprise, surprise!) the Gini coefficient to measure within-year nomination imbalance. This will show us whether a lucky few movies really are gobbling up all the nominations. Let's take a look:
You be the judge, but this plot doesn't make me think there's any worrying trend. Sure, this year's nominations are less spread out than the last few ceremonies' were, but imbalance seems to randomly hiccup up and down as the years go by.
Interestingly, here's what that same graph would look like if we replaced all the dots with Kens:
