After assessing the Oscar nomination patterns and how the Academy tends to look at them, I next like to assess what the current view is of the films by the two movie communities – the viewing public and film critics – that make a difference in determining a movie’s impact. Both of these communities have different ways of looking at a movie and it is instructive to understand what they think about any given film. Assessed over a group of films, we can establish relative rankings based on their scores.
Audience Ratings of Oscar Nominees: Special Interest Films
Documentary Feature – The audience favorite in the Documentary category was 20 Days in Mariupol about the Russian invasion of the Ukrainian city. The other four films fall at least six points behind the leader in audience appeal.
Movie Audience Rating
20 Days in Mariupol 91
The Eternal Memory 85
To Kill a Tiger 84
Four Daughters 82
Bobi Wine: The People’s President 79
Animated Feature – Again a clear leader in audience appeal with Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse a runaway favorite, the remaining four animated films were all rated very close. (Note, though, that audience ratings may not be reliable for Elemental. See Measurement Details Below.)
Movie Audience Rating
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse 90
Nimona 83
The Boy and the Heron 82
Elemental 82*
Robot Dreams 81
International Feature – And, again, another audience favorite in Perfect Days from Japan, with three of the remaining films all bunched fairly tightly together. (Note that The Teachers’ Lounge rates way at the bottom of almost every list, but we’ve noted that there are likely some issues with at least one of the Audience scales.)
Movie Audience Rating
Perfect Days (Japan) 86
Society of the Snow (Spain) 83
Lo Capitano (Italy) 82
The Zone of Interest (UK) 78
The Teachers’ Lounge (Germany) 67*
Audience Ratings of Oscar Nominees: General Interest Films
Audience reaction to the 24 general interest films has a greater range (from a high of 91 to a low of 62) but most of the movies are within a thirteen point spread showing modest variation.
The highest rated movie, according to the viewing public, was Godzilla Minus One a special effects laden sci-fi monster film. Nominated only in the Visual Effects category, I suspect it is a fun film to watch.
At the bottom of the listing are five films that we can say weren’t well received by their viewers. The Creator and Napoleon were nominated, variously, for visual effects, sound, costumes, or production design and so, like the highest rated film, is probably fun to watch, but given the audience reaction, it may have a confusing or uninspiring storyline. El Conde received a single nomination for cinematography and, aside from it being a comedy/drama/history genre film, I haven’t the faintest idea why it is near the bottom. May December was only nominated for its script, a major category, but might not have great audience appeal because of visual characteristics, tone, or storyline. And then, also at the bottom of audience ratings, Maestro curiously received a Best Picture nomination and ranks fifth on my Oscar Quality Index – a film the Academy likes – but the public doesn’t.
As the following list shows, the remaining 18 films fall pretty much in a consistent sequence from top to bottom. (Note that there are some audience reliability issues on the *ed ratings – see below.)
Movie Audience Rating
Godzilla Minus One 91
Oppenheimer 88
Guardians of the Galaxy (Vol3) 87
American Fiction 86
The Holdovers 86
Mission: Impossible… 86
Anatomy of a Fall 84
The Color Purple 83*
Past Lives 82
Poor Things 82*
Killers of the Flower Moon 81
Nyad 80
Flamin’ Hot 78
The Zone of Interest 78
Indian Jones and the Dial… 77
Barbie 76
Rustin 76
Golda 75*
American Symphony 75
The Creator 72
May December 68
El Conde 65
Maestro 62
Napoleon 62
Critic Ratings of Oscar Nominees: Special Interest Films
Documentary Feature – The critic favorite in the Documentary category was To Kill a Tiger about a father in India protecting his daughter. The other four films are all within 8 points of the leader, so critics think they are pretty competitive with each other. (Note the measurement issue with the bottom rated film. See Measurement Details Below.)
Movie Critical Rating
To Kill a Tiger 94
20 Days in Mariupol 92
The Eternal Memory 89
Four Daughters 88
Bobi Wine: The People’s President 86*
Animated Feature – The critical choice in this category is between The Boy and the Heron and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse, although the first four films are all within ten points of each other. What is curious is the disastrous position of Elemental, a Disney/Pixar entry which, usually, is enough to win audiences, critics, and academy votes.
Movie Critical Rating
The Boy and the Heron 94
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse 92
Robot Dreams 88
Nimona 84
Elemental 66
International Feature – The first four films are all fairly close in critical opinion, so this should be an interesting competition.
Movie Critical Rating
The Zone of Interest (UK) 92
The Teachers’ Lounge (Germany) 90
Lo Capitano (Italy) 88
Perfect Days (Japan) 88
Society of the Snow (Spain) 82
Critical Ratings of Oscar Nominees: General Interest Films
Critical reaction to the 24 general interest films has a much greater range of rating numbers from a high of 95 to a low of just 50. Past Lives is a critical favorite (and received a Best Picture nomination). But seven movies in the second grouping also received Best Picture nods so there is more of a correlation between the Academy and the critics than there is with the public. (I’m not sure that surprises many people.). It is surprising that two of the highly rated popular films (Godzilla Minus One and the Mission Impossible movie made it onto the critics’ top ten. (More comparisons like this in the next section.)
On the other end of the scale, I have no idea why critics found Golda so bad, but a rating of 50 is about as low a rating I’ve ever seen for an Oscar-nominated film, so I’m intrigued to understand what else is going on there. None of the bottom five films were nominated for any major category so their placement towards the bottom of this ranking is not surprising. (Note that the two *ed films have issues with their critical ranking measures, so their placement needs to be treated with caution. See Measurement Details below.)
Movie Critical Rating
Past Lives 95
The Zone of Interest 92
Oppenheimer 92
Anatomy of a Fall 91
Killers of the Flower Moon 91
Godzilla Minus One 90
The Holdovers 90
Poor Things 90
Mission: Impossible: Dead.. 88
May December 88
American Fiction 88
American Symphony 85
Barbie 84
Maestro 78
The Color Purple 77
El Conde 77
Rustin 76
Nyad 75*
Guardians of the Galaxy (Vol3) 73
The Creator 65
Indian Jones and the Dial… 64
Flamin’ Hot 64
Napoleon 61*
Golda 50
Audience vs Critical Rankings of the Oscar Nominees: The Real Fun
Audience and critical rankings, viewed by themselves, are moderately interesting, but what I find MOST interesting is when the two groups of movie-viewers disagree. As I’ve argued before, both groups bring important perspectives to a film and because there is no reason the two groups should agree on everything they see, it is instructive to compare where they view things the same and where they see things different: What makes one film good to a general audience and bad to a critic, and vice-versa?
In this post I won’t be exploring why or how that happens, I will only identify those films where there are differences and similarities in ratings. I do that by taking the two scales I have already reported above and compare where the adjusted differences in ratings are more than an arbitrary 10 points. (There are statistical methods to compare two rank sets for similarity and difference, but I neither have those tools, nor do I really think this subject deserves that kind of effort. Lord knows, Joan thinks I’ve already spent too much time on this!). So here we go:
Audience vs Critical Rankings of the Oscar Nominees: The Special Interest Films
Documentary Features – The interesting thing about these five films is that critics and audiences are in striking agreement. Sure there is some variation, but it isn’t huge, they are within discussion range of each other.
Movie Audience/Critic Difference
To Kill a Tiger -5
Bobi Wine: The People’s President -3*
Four Daughters -1
The Eternal Memory 1
20 Days in Mariupol 4
Animated Feature – We only have one big disagreement with these films and that’s with Elemental with the viewing public rating this film significantly higher than critics. While I can think of reasons why that might be true, I won’t commit to them in writing until I’ve seen the movie. (It should also be noted that this is one of the films where the audience rating has some inconsistent measurement issues – see below – so the difference with the critics might be an artifact of that problem.)
Movie Audience/Critic Difference
The Boy and the Heron -7
Robot Dreams -3
Nimona 4
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse 5
Elemental 21*
International Feature – Critics rated The Zone of Interest and The Teachers’ Lounge much higher than the viewing public did. At the moment I have no idea how to explain that – (although it should be noted that The Teachers’ Lounge had a measurement issue with the audience rating, so the low rating may not be accurate. See Below.)
Movie Audience/Critical Difference
The Teachers’ Lounge (Germany) -19*
The Zone of Interest (UK) -10
Lo Capitano (Italy) -2
Perfect Days (Japan) 3
Society of the Snow (Spain) 6
Audience vs Critical Rankings of the Oscar Nominees: The General Interest Films
It is relatively easy to look at the rankings on just five films (the special interest categories) and compare them, but much harder when there are 24 of them. There are 9 (out of 24 general interest movies) where the difference between the adjusted audience and critical ratings are more than ten points. They are:
Movie Audience/Critic Difference
Golda 27*
Flamin’ Hot 17
Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3 16
Indiana Jones and the Dial… 15
El Conde -11
Past Lives -12
The Zone of Interest -13
Maestro -14
May December -19
The top four films are those where the viewing public viewed the film as significantly better than the critics did. (As noted below, there may be a measurement issue on the audience reaction to Golda so this huge difference may mitigate some. Flamin’ Hot was nominated only for Original Song, by Becky G. I’m guessing that there isn’t much else to recommend this film, but I’ve been surprised in this Oscar category before (e.g. RRR from last year!). The other two are simply popular action films, one nominated for Score and the other for Visual Effects. So there are likely reasons why the critics panned them since they seem to always be looking for “bigger” experiences.
The last five are all movies where the critics rated the movies higher than the viewing public did. Having not seen them, it is difficult to understand why there is such a negative reaction from the public. But all five of them intrigue me with their subject matter, so these five films will be discussed especially with the idea of critic vs general public in mind. Three of them are Best Picture nominees.
Measurement Details: Audience Ratings (read at your own risk!)
I use two different audience ratings, compare the two scales to determine possible measurement bias, and then adjust and average their numbers into a unique audience rating number. The first thing I noticed was that the average rating across all 38 films one one scale was 11 points (1-100 scales) higher than the other. It is a little difficult to know what causes one group of film goers to consistently rate movies higher but it could have to do with when and how the rating is asked. For example, if the rating is requested right at a movie theater it might be enhanced with enthusiasm and energy of the moment and come out higher than it does if assessed a day later at home. These are the measurement issues of reliability and validity that social sciences have to deal with all the time and, in this case, I don’t have enough information to answer why that is occurring. But once I know it is, I can adjust for the difference by taking the scale of the higher group and subtracting 11 points from their rating to make it equivalent to the other scale.
The next step is to determine whether the scales are yielding similar results, again a question of measurement reliability and validity. There are statistical ways to do all that, but, given the population I’m dealing with and the fact that this isn’t really an earthshaking social science paper, I simply looked at all those films where the ratings differed by more than ten points. And there are five of them:
Movie Adjusted Difference
Poor Things 16 points
The Teachers’ Lounge 27 points
The Color Purple 14 points
Elemental 12 points
Golda 21 points
We’re going to go ahead and average the two audience ratings and use that number as the audience rating. However we will need to keep in mind this list of films whenever we talk about audience ratings because it means something else is going on. Elemental is an animated, family oriented film and The Teachers’ Lounge an International feature from Germany and so these films may have unique audiences which might explain the variation. But the other three films are of general interest so I do not know, at this point what makes them sensitive to measurement error.
Measurement Details: Critic Ratings (Read at your own risk!)
As with audience ratings, I use two different critic ratings, compare the two scales to determine possible measurement bias, and then adjust and average their numbers into a unique critical rating number. As in the two audience scales, there is an 11 point difference in the average rating between the two critical rating measures. While I might have some explanation for the difference in the first set of measures, I cannot understand how two aggregations of critical reviews can come up with different ranges of numbers. But we will apply the same adjustment for the critic scales that we did with the audience scales.
The next step is to determine whether the scales are yielding similar results, again a question of measurement reliability and validity. There are statistical ways to do all that, but, given the population I’m dealing with and the fact that this isn’t really an earthshaking social science paper, I simply looked at all those films where the ratings differed by more than ten points. And there are three of them:
Movie Adjusted Difference
Bobi Wine: The People’s… 17 points
Nyad 11 points
Napoleon 17 points
We’re going to go ahead and average the two audience ratings and use that number as the audience rating. However we will need to keep this list in mind whenever we talk about critical ratings because it means something else is going on. Bobi Wine: The People’s President is an documentary and may not have been reviewed much at this point. Napoleon is a controversial film from the get go, so I’m not too surprised that we have critical variance. And I’m not sure what the issue is with Nyad but the variation between the two scales is relatively small, so it may not be a big deal anyway.
2 thoughts on “2024 Oscar Nominees: What Others Think”
Quite interesting.
The variance between public and critics for Zone of Interest? The movie’s message is relatively subtle and another movie about the Holocaust is probably not a crowd pleaser anyway.
But the variance for The Teachers Lounge seems more puzzling. Assuming we’re talking about a public who would watch a foreign language film as a baseline, I don’t see why this film isn’t just as compelling to public as to critics. The main character is relatable. The crisis is understandable. What is it? I don’t know.
Having not seen either one, I don’t what’s causing the variance. But that’s part of the fun of watching movies!