All the fun speculation about possible acting nods for W. overlooks the single tangible factor that argues most convincingly against it. There’s an easy measurement proven to be a reliable indicator over the the past several years. I don’t like to beat the same boring drum, guys, but W. does not have the critical acclaim a movie needs to break into the top categories. The rule is simple:
Movies that don’t have a metacritic score above 60 do not get nominated in the top 8 categories. (And rarely in any other category.)
Without being confrontational, I’d like to respectfully challenge anybody to find exceptions to this rule. I’ll shut up about this if someone can name 3 movies from the past 3 awards cycles that have metacritic scores lower than 60 and were nominated for any of the following honors:
Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Screenplay.
In fact, go back 5 or 6 years if you want to. Are the criteria clear? Find a movie with a metacritic rating lower than 60 that received a nomination in any of the 8 categories listed. I’ll do Best Picture to get us started. The answer is after the cut, plus a big fancy chart with more data.
Only one Best Picture nominee in the past 5 years received a metacritic score lower than 70 — (That’s 70, not 60). That movie was Crash with a 69.
I’m not saying that no exceptions to this mathematical rule exist. Just that I can’t find any with a quick skim. I’m genuinely curious to find how many under-60 nominees made the cut, so then we can figure the odds.
Happy hunting!
The chart above also lists the highest ranking movies on the IMDb 250 that did not get an Best Picture Nomination. Looking back, are there any of those titles we’d substitute for actual nominees?
