What If Letterboxd Ratings Decided the Best Picture Oscar?
In deciding the Oscar Best Picture winners from 1927-2023, let’s say you relied on the contemporary ratings of films on Letterboxd instead of the Academy vote totals of the time. Sometimes, you’d get the same answers but rarely. You’d get lots more foreign films from directors like Ozu, Kurosawa, Truffaut, Leone, Bergman, and Tarkovsky. You’d get Best Picture wins for The Empire Strikes Back (over Ordinary People), Do the Right Thing (over Driving Miss Daisy), and Brokeback Mountain (over Crash). And Paddington 2!
Looking at just one year, 1999 was a good one for movies but the Oscar nominees were on the safer side:
American Beauty
The Cider House Rules
The Green Mile
The Insider
The Sixth Sense
Here’s the Letterboxd list from 1999, ranked by rating (more than 1K ratings):
Fight Club
The Iron Giant
The Green Mile
Magnolia
All About My Mother
The Matrix
The Straight Story
Beau Travail
The Insider
Being John Malkovich
American Beauty and The Sixth Sense are further down the list and The Cider House Rules is nowhere to be found. Anyway, interesting to compare!
Comments 4
I haven’t seen it since it was released but I will just say that at the time, I really liked the Cider House Rules when it came out. I’m a sucker for earnest schmaltzy preachy stuff? Also I was 19 at the time so I guess take this with a grain of salt.
1999: Very surprised that American Beauty isn't in the top flight of the Letterboxd list. I saw almost all of these movies that year, and it is the only one that I immediately thought "THAT should be Best Picture this year."
But can I put in a word for Paddington 2? With a totally un-ironic exclamation point! It is one of the most unequivocally delightful things I've ever seen in a theater. In the pleasurableness stratosphere with Chaplin and Miyazaki. I feel lucky that my kids were still of an age that drew me in to see it. Twice. Good on anybody who upvoted that film.
This is a fascinating look, but I also think there is a different analysis going on when judging the quality of a movie over time vs it being judged at the time of release.
As time passes we rely more on the quality of the movie and less on its cultural impact or the current events that it was speaking to at the time.
I also was going to say that there would have been a distinct difference between how the movies were rated the year they were released vs. how we look at them 25 years on. Among other things, American Beauty is now viewed through the lens of "middle aged man lusts after 16yo" which has lost a lot of its cachet since 1999, and everything we have learned about Kevin Spacey. Would be interesting to see how the movies that are highly rated now are viewed 10 years hence, including whichever are nominated for top honors.
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