Is 'Bohemian Rhapsody' The Worst Best Picture Nominee Of The 2000s?
Bohemian has been a source of major annoyance for Jeff, Trillballins and I. Like most rational humans, we agree that it is a below average/ maybe average movie that took a lot of weird creative liberties telling Freddie Mercury’s story. Said liberties wouldn’t matter much if they made the movie better, but they made it worse. This, combined with the film’s weird propaganda campaign to establish Brian May as the actual mastermind behind Queen, has made it a bit of a punching bag for us. When Rami Malek won best actor over Bradley Cooper at the Golden Globes, I was a little shocked, but when Bohemian Rhapsody won over ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’, ‘Blackkklansman’ and ‘A Star is Born’, I flipped a shit.
To be clear, I’m not the only one that thinks this. It currently sits at a pretty bad 62% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes (I gave it a 67), which got me thinking, is this one of the worst best picture nominees? So I put together some of the data from all the best picture nominees from 2000-today, 127 movies total, to see how this film stacks up.
The way I figure, both the critic score and the audience score matter because both sides get things right and wrong. So if you take the average of both scores combined for all of these movies, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ places 120/127 for average score. That is ABYSMAL! There is absolutely no call for this to be in contention over movies like ‘Eighth Grade’, ‘If Beale Street Could Talk’, ‘Annihilation’, ‘First Reformed’, ‘Can You Ever Forgive Me’ and many many more. Idealistically, my personal favorite movie of the year ‘Mission Impossible: Fallout’ should be up there as well, but that would never happen.
It’s a travesty, but thats just the world of cinema we live in. Black Panther and Vice don’t really belong in the running either, but they have had so much momentum and praise that the pressure must have been enormous. I also want to note how LOTR The Two Towers placed in the top 5 of this ranking. *Extremely Brian Baldinger Breakdown Voice* Check out this dude. Thats a movie right there. Gandalf and Aragon fighting at Helms deep? Gollee./
P.S. As u/shootymcgavgav pointed out in our reddit, if you use this same metric on the other BP nominees from this year (I only included ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ because thats the focus of the blog) than ‘Vice’ is actually second worst on the list with an average of 59. It’s a little more of a gray area because it’s left-leaning political movie and it also hasn’t even been out for a month yet, but thats food for thought. If I had to pick my top 8 movies of the year, ‘Vice’ wouldn’t make it but I certainly think it’s much better than the bulk of this list.
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