For a certain class of Oscar viewers, the Best Original Screenplay category has always been the one to watch. That’s where the best films end up — the movies toosmart or creative to be fully appreciated by the broader Academy, and certainly not widely accepted enough to get into the Best Picture race. It’s the category for movies that challenge traditional notions of filmmaking. In the 1950s, it was where arthouse icons like Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, and François Truffaut received their first nominations. In 1989, it was the category that recognized two huge game-changers of American cinema, Do the Right Thing and Sex, Lies, and Videotape. And in the 2000s, it became the refuge for the favorite films of a new generation of cinephiles — films like Memento, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Pan’s Labyrinth.
But these films are no longer getting segregated into the screenplay categories. Now, they’re Best Picture nominees, and even serious contenders for the award. Spike Jonze’s 1999 movie Being John Malkovich didn’t receive a Best Picture nomination, but his 2013 movie Her did. Wes Anderson didn’t get a Best Picture nomination for 2001’s The Royal Tenenbaums, but he did for 2014’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. And Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1997 hit Boogie Nights wasn’t nominated for Best Picture, but his Phantom Thread is a nominee this year. These are all cases where young, disruptive directors have gradually become more accepted and familiar to the Academy over time. But their nominated films are just as wonderfully weird, uncompromisingly specific, and personal as the films that missed out a decade or more earlier. And their modern equivalents, first-time solo directors Greta Gerwig and Jordan Peele, are starting their directorial careers with Best Picture nominations for their own idiosyncratic personal visions.
The easy explanation is that the number of allowed Best Picture nominees was expanded in 2009, permitting a wider range of options. That’s true, and it’s a factor, but it doesn’t get us all the way there. After all, Get Out and Lady Bird — which wouldn’t have received Best Picture nominations 10 years ago — weren’t merely the eighth or ninth films that got into the field; they’re both considered contenders to actually win Best Picture. They’re ranked the third and fourth most likely winners, respectively, according to Gold Derby, and Oscar experts have championed both of them as potential winners. Like any major institutional shift, the growing number of offbeat Best Picture nominees comes from several interconnected factors: the nomination process for Best Picture has changed, and the Academy’s makeup has changed. But there’s another factor: the ubiquity of Rotten Tomatoes, which seems to have created an unprecedented unity between critical taste and Oscar results.
For most of Oscar history, a film could rack up a ton of third, fourth, or fifth-place votes on the ballots and receive a Best Picture nomination. Though it’s impossible to say for sure, it’s reasonably likely that’s how middling-popular nominees like Seabiscuit and The Full Monty made it into the race. But those days are gone. The rules were substantially changed in 2011, and now, for a film to receive a Best Picture nomination, it needs at least 5 percent of the first-place votes. In effect, that shift altered the Best Picture nomination process from a measure of consensus to a measure of passion. And it makes great sense — why should a film be nominated for Best Picture if there isn’t a sizable faction of the Academy who think it’s actually the year’s best picture?
The percentage-requirement change is probably the biggest reason we’re seeing more idiosyncratic, personal films in the Best Picture category. When Being John Malkovich was relegated to the Original Screenplay category in 1999 (while The Cider House Rules received a dubious Best Picture nomination), it was more likely due to a lack of consensus, not passion. People who embraced Being John Malkovich were fervid fans, but it was probably way too bizarre for many Academy members.
And the Academy’s new membership demographics make it easier for these films to hit the 5 percent benchmark. The Academy has taken the initiative in addressing its diversity issues by inviting more than 1,000 new members in the last two years, many from previously underrepresented groups such as women, people of color, or foreign auteurs. This new diversity of thought in the voter pool has probably increased the number of members who are deliberately looking outside traditional Best Picture fare. Instead, they’re finding subtle character pieces like Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea, and Lady Bird — all films that would have had a hard time breaking out of the screenplay races as recently as five to 10 years ago.
One other major change in Academy membership is worth mentioning: Harvey Weinstein is gone. Several of the most notorious “How did that get a Best Picture nomination?” poster children of the last two decades — films like The Reader and The Cider House Rules — were distributed by Weinstein companies, with Weinstein campaigning for them. His skill at bullying voters into selecting his films was legendary, and it’s no longer in play. But that type of forceful persuasion might have been replaced by another — the cold, hard math of Rotten Tomatoes consensus.
It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment that the cultural proliferation of Rotten Tomatoes hit critical mass. Flixster bought the site at the beginning of 2010, and Warner Bros. bought both in 2011. The Rotten Tomatoes scores for Best Picture nominees over the years seem to suggest that some kind of shift occurred in the early 2010s. The Best Picture nominees released from 2000 to 2009 have an average Tomato score of 86.4, while the nominees released since 2010 jump to an average score of 90.5.
But that jump becomes especially telling in the details, particularly with what we see at both the bottom and the top of the annual Best Picture crop. From 2000 to 2014, there were 19 Best Picture nominees with a Tomato score below 80, and four nominees that scored lower than 70. But in the last three years, only a single Best Picture nominee has even had a score lower than 86 (The Revenant), and nothing has been below 80. Even more fascinating: from 2000 to 2010, only one Best Picture winner (The Hurt Locker)was also the highest scoring of the nominees from its year. But since 2011, five out of six Best Picture winners have had the highest Tomato score of their nominee group. (Birdman was the exception.)
The cause for these shifts just might be the same — the very nature of such ubiquitous numeric scores being associated with films could be essentially shaming Oscar voters into no longer nominating films like The Reader (62), and no longer allowing films like Crash or A Beautiful Mind (both 75) to actually win the damn thing. Instead, films like Get Out and Lady Bird (both 99) are getting nominated, and they’re really threatening to win.
Rotten Tomatoes scores are the opposite of the new Best Picture nominating process — they measure consensus instead of passion. And consensus expressed as a simple, stark number can be a powerful persuader. Ten years ago, Academy voters surely knew WALL-E was well-loved, but a lot of movies are well-loved; that in itself is not a persuasive argument for a Best Picture nomination. But what if those 2008 voters knew that WALL-E carried a 96 Tomato score, while The Reader was only at 62? Suddenly, it’d be harder for them to convince themselves that The Reader was more worthy of their ballot. And it’d be easier for any individual voter to worry that they personally might be helping delegitimize the Oscars by keeping out the best movies.
The Academy’s tastes have often clashed with critical and popular opinion, leading to endless “Times the wrong film won the Oscar” articles. But current statistics suggest that the voters and the public are moving into alignment. With an average Tomato score of 92.9, this year’s Best Picture nominees have the second highest collective Tomato rating of any Best Picture crop this century. (Only the 2011 nominees — the year The King’s Speech won — ranked higher, with a 93.2 average score.) Whether this is direct causation, and Academy members are being directly influenced by these Tomato scores, is impossible to say. But it is clear that the Oscars started nominating (and awarding) more highly rated films for Best Picture almost exactly around the time that Rotten Tomatoes scores became inescapable in the zeitgeist.
Certainly other factors are helping. Social media helps popularize underdogs, and builds consensus around fan-favorite films. But social media also contributes to making a film’s Tomato score even more ubiquitous. For example, Lady Bird’s reputation as a must-see film certainly spread through Facebook and Twitter, but a large part of what was specifically spreading that reputation were the stories about its 99 Tomato score, which was extremely well-publicized before the film even opened in most markets.
Lady Bird and Get Out are wonderful films that would be worthy Best Picture winners, but do all the Academy members voting for them completely agree with that? Or did some of these voters simply fall into line with all the press emphasizing the universal praise? For that matter, did some critics who contributed to those scores succumb to the same pressures? Certainly many Academy voters wouldn’t be susceptible to that sort of pressure, particularly given the anonymous nature of voting. But there has also always been a faction of the Academy that cares deeply about the Oscars’ reputation, as evidenced in part by voters’ tendency to pick safe, middlebrow, respectable films over unique films that drive passionate response. Those members might be particularly vulnerable to being swayed by such plainly visible critical consensus.
It would be nice to feel like voters genuinely don’t feel pressured by numeric data. But it’s hard to argue with the results. In what used to pass for a normal year, the Original Screenplay category would have the two or three Best Picture nominees that qualified, and then another two or three weirder (probably better) films that stood little chance of getting nominated in other major categories. This year, the opposite happened; there are several Best Picture nominees that couldn’t manage to get nominated in the Original Screenplay category.
Ironically, one of those films is Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. Yes, the archetypal auteur who repeatedly wound up in the screenplay races (for Boogie Nights, Magnolia, There Will Be Blood, and Inherent Vice) but rarely in the Best Picture race (only once before, with There Will Be Blood) has now had the tables turned. Phantom Thread was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor, but it couldn’t squeeze out a Best Original Screenplay nomination. The field was just too stacked. (The five nominees were The Big Sick, Get Out, Lady Bird, The Shape of Water, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.) And now those of us who used to ride hard for the Original Screenplay category are faced with a bizarre new status quo — finally, the Best Picture category feels like the most thorough gathering of the year’s best films.
Let’s block ads! (Why?)
