Just for fun, an update on a topic I often raised in the 1990s
Worst five nominees:
Rank Film Year IMDb
1 Emilia Pérez 2024 5.3
2 Doctor Dolittle 1967 6.2
T-3 Three Coins in the Fountain 1954 6.3
T-3 Tom Jones 1963 6.3
T-5 The Greatest Show on Earth 1952 6.5
T-5 Maestro 2023 6.5
Worst five winners:
Rank Film Year IMDb
1 Tom Jones 1963 6.3
2 The Greatest Show on Earth 1952 6.5
3 Gigi 1958 6.6
4 Around the World in 80 Days 1956 6.7
T-5 Chariots of Fire 1981 7.1
T-5 Shakespeare in Love 1998 7.1
The one most salient item on those lists: Emilia Perez is not only the worst nominee, but is the worst by a mile. It wins the 100-yard dash by about 50 yards. If low scores were an event in the Aztec games, the high priest would now be cutting its heart out.
And that sumbitch had 13 nominations!
(For reference, the reviews were mediocre. It is scored 70 at Metacritic. That’s OK for a summer comedy or a thriller, but mighty weak for a Best Picture nominee. Maestro, the other recent addition to the lists, is scored 77.)
Oscar’s kind of drove themselves off a cliff in the past decade or so. Hard to take them seriously with stuff like Anora or One Battle or Everything Everywhere winning and then being forgotten almost instantly.
Looking over the past few years, I’d say Oppenheimer and Parasite were the only ones that actually deserved it in my opinion – everything else was flavor of the month or politically oriented or just not something that will hold up over the years.
Decade by decade, it seems to cycle between commercial pictures and those with artistic aspirations. I wish the current cycle would end, and popular films would reappear. I was OK with Oppenheimer and CODA for sure, but in most years my real choice doesn’t even get nominated.
Except for Oppenheimer, is there any film from 2016-2025 that will stand the test of time? Maybe Sinners and a couple of comic book adaptations, but it seems that the memorable, noteworthy efforts are coming to us in series form lately.
Even in the series world, it’s all serious stuff. Where are the great sitcoms? There hasn’t really been a great one in a while. I love Ted Lasso, a great series with a lot of heart, but it’s not really laugh-out-loud funny that often, and Hacks is more character-based dramedy rather than straight-up laughs like 30 Rock or Brooklyn 99.
Emilia Perez looks somewhat brigaded. A shit ton of “1s” as expected but weirdly a lot of “5’s”. One weird quirk is a lack of “10’s”. Normally I assume that a 10/10s are from your publicists, friends and family members. Its like they didn’t even want to put in the effort because the film isn’t worth it.
Tom Jones by comparison has a natural looking bell curve centred around a 6-7 with a healthy amount of 10s from your friends.
Emilia Perez would be even lower if IMDb did a straight arithmetic mean. The raw average is 4.7, but IMDb applies some secret sauce, presumably to alleviate the impact of shenanigans, to arrive at a weighted average of 5.3.
Even if you eliminate all of the 1s and calculate the raw average of the other 77% of the ballots, the result is still below the Dolittle line. (Dolittle is the movie Mendoza.)
Shakespeare in Love won best picture in 1999 and it was easily the best of the nominees.
Shakespear in Love is, until the last few years, the worst Academy Award recipient of the modern era. Harvey bought every award it received, and his shenanigans changed what was allowed by AMPAS for Oscar campaigns. It’s still bullshit, but not quite as transparently bribalicious.
I am, honestly, incapable of understanding how you could place a 5th rate RomCom above Saving Private Ryan? or Thin Red Line? Or, if you want some actual history with your film, Elizabeth?
Saving Private Ryan has one fantastic sequence, the Omaha beach assault, after which it descends into puerile farce.
‘Shakespeare in Love’ has one of the cleverest, funniest screenplays ever filmed. Maybe you didn’t notice?
I will 100% grant you the dialogue had some zing – Tom Stoppard is great!. Too bad it was uttered by talentless buffoons like wackadoodle Paltrow and the far less talented Fiennes brother. Neither of them have a whit of skill at portraying desire or anything resembling chemistry. The quality of the script couldn’t change the lack of ability of the leads.
Fine, you can dislike Private Ryan. But I would still tell you that both other nominees mentioned are superior to this drivel. There’s also the reality that there is more filmmaking talent in the Omaha beach scene than John Madden has displayed in his entire career. And I’d rather watch the cast of Saving Private Ryan with a lesser script than SiL.
Best Picture used to be about when all the elements worked together to make the Best Film. That year? It was about how much Harvey would spend to make his company more shiny than the other kids on the Disney lot.
I revisited the review our esteemed host gave Shakespeare in Love. I broadly agreed with it back in 1998, and I still do.
Paltrow may be an obnoxious pain in the arse, and Fiennes not much of an actor, but they both nailed their roles in SiL
I don’t even recognize that review as my own. Who was that guy who wrote it? I had forgotten that there was a time when I actually spent time on eloquence and other bagatelles. I miss the days when my son or The Realist did all the day-to-day work and I could spend all my time constructing film reviews.
Tom Stoppard’s Oscar for the best original screenplay was a lock. It was head and shoulders above anything else, filled with inside theatrical references and specific nods to ol’ Billy Shakespeare, employing many of the great author’s own tricks. There are about ten screenplays in history that I would happily take credit for if I could somehow steal that valor from the people who deserved it, like that guy in Yesterday who went into an alternate timeline to write all the Lennon-McCartney songs. This is one of the ones I’d steal.
Similarly, Spielberg’s award as the best director was clearly earned. The guy recreated WW2, f’r chris’sakes, and he did it with 1998 technology.
Which film deserved to win “Best Picture”? Where is the basis to compare a witty, upper-middlebrow romantic comedy to a grand spectacle with some real depth? I always say that the best comedy should be as valuable as the best drama, and that the Oscars should have two separate categories (or more, maybe musicals should be in a third group), but they don’t.
That said, the late 1990s was one of the greatest periods in the history of cinema, and I don’t think SiL was the best of the best. It wasn’t even the most memorable comedy of the year, because the dude abode. It is fair to argue that it should not have been nominated in a year when the nominee count was restricted to five, and the year included The Big Lebowski, Saving Private Ryan, American History X, Rushmore, The Truman Show, The Legend of 1900, Dark City, Gods and Monsters, and probably ten others I am forgetting.
It’s hard to believe that they used to make mass market theatrical releases without comic book characters.
Having acknowledged that, I think I am now going to watch Shakespeare in Love for the fourth or fifth time, because my review reminded me how much I loved that script.
I enjoyed “Shakespeare in Love.” I guess I don’t know anything about movies.
You’re absolutely welcome to like it – Enjoy! I have no beef with someone liking a movie! It’s completely subjective! I do, however, have umbrage with an objectively lesser film being praised/awarded due to deeper pockets and lesser ethics.
It was, for me, the first public showing of what an incredible shitty human being Harvey Weienstein was. I’d seen allusions in print previous, but this was so blatant that even mainstream press was reporting on him spending $100MM+ to get Best Picture for SiL.
I dropped IMDB as a source of any value the *millisecond* Amazon bought it. They have cooked algo’s for pay, use it to push product, etc. It’s not a reliable source of anything other than online vibes about a given film. IMDB ratings are useless, IMVeryNHO. And I say this as a former ‘zon employee.
Where is Forest Gump, arguably the most mawkish film of the 90’s? Or Gandhi, the worst kind of H’wood “biography (ignore everything that doesn’t serve narrative of the feel good life that changed the world)? Out of Africa (which is actually a fine film, but wasn’t even the fifth best film of that year)? Gladiator (worst acting of any modern film? ? Chicago? Oliver?!?
It’s subjective claptrap to sell tickets. The best films are often not even nominated much less win. Learned in the 80’s (Kurosawa was robbed – Ran is as near a perfect film as any other of the decade) and reinforced more times than I care to count.
Rotten Tomatoes is directly operated by Fandango Media, which is owned through a joint venture between Versant Media Group (75% majority stake) and Warner Bros. Discovery (25% minority stake) and is also worthless.
RT you can at least read the linked reviews. I use the Tomatometer itself as a measure for how much money I’m willing to spend.
75% means its ok to spend money on a good venue. 50% is cheep night. 25% is streaming/piracy.
Around 2010 I did a mini-festival and watched all the Oscar winners I had never seen. Greatest Show on Earth is the only one I thought was totally irredeemable (ironic, given the title).
All the others had at least _something_ memorable, so you could at least partially understand what that year’s voters were thinking.
Greatest Show on Earth is indeed pretty bad, but it did provide significant inspiration for a young Steven Spielberg, so it does have at least one redeeming quality.
Aside from the money game played by Weinstein, I wonder if there wasn’t some vote splitting that left a lesser film on top. Probably the weakest of the noms, but not necessarily a clear stand-out among the other 4.