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!

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Love Letters from Letterboxd

The Oscars are this weekend and in this video, some of the nominees — Paul Mescal, Rian Johnson, Todd Field, Camille Friend (hairstylist for Wakanda Forever) — read rave reviews of their work from Letterboxd. Watch to the end — Ke Huy Quan’s letter, and his reaction to it, is especially wonderful.

Ten years ago, I met the founders of Letterboxd in New Zealand. The site was tiny then and had just gotten out of invitation-only mode. But they were enthusiastic and had a vision of making an online space for discussing and reviewing movies. It’s wonderful to see the site become such a key part of the film industry. (via @jasonsantamaria)

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