The Letterboxd Oscars: Breakdown and Analysis
I recently made a video titled The Letterboxd Oscars where I looked at every Best Picture winner of the Academy Awards (1927 - present) through the lens of Letterboxd to see how different, or indeed similar, the results would be in choosing a winner for each year. Let’s take a closer look at the findings.
But first, what is Letterboxd? Letterboxd is a social platform created and developed by New Zealanders, Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow back in 2011. It was made for film fans as a way of cataloging and rating/reviewing movies while also interacting with other users on the platform. You can make lists of films you’ve seen as well as keep track of a movie diary to look back on. As of September 2023, the platform has garnered over 10 million users. Letterboxd’s catalogue of films stretches from present day releases all the way back to the 1870s and the initial inception of moving images.
And what exactly does “Best Picture” mean? The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences was founded in 1927, ostensibly by MGM mogul and producer Louis B. Mayer. It was created in a time where actors, directors and other film making branches wanted to unionise for fairer treatment and pay in the era of the studio system of Hollywood. Studios and producers held all the power over the contracted creative artists so an awards ceremony was created in order to keep those dissatisfied players under contract. If you wanted to win an award, you had to stay in the club. During the ceremony, individual achievements were awarded with golden statuettes; Best Actor/Actress, Best Director, Best Screenplay etc. While the biggest award of the night would go to the best film of the year, Best Picture. The way the results are tabulated has been altered throughout the history of the awards but essentially each branch (actors, writers, costume department, etc) of the Academy vote for their favourite performances of their respective category (e.g. actors vote for acting performances). Once voting for those individual categories is over and five nominees have been selected the entire Academy vote for the final winner. The number of members has increased exponentially since its beginnings and as of 2022 the number of voting members has reached up to nearly 9.5 thousand.
However, those thousands of members can’t be expected to represent the tens of millions of film fans watching the Oscars being handed out each year, right? Cinephiles all have their favourites and least favourites. A film could bring one person to tears while also boring another person to death. It’s all subjective at the end of the day. It’s the opposite to sports where a clear objective is set, whoever racks up more points, goals or goes fastest is crowned the winner. There have been countless articles, words penned or spoken about how the Oscars “got it wrong” about a particular category or winner over its near century of decision making, mostly by those of us watching passively. So what if the average film fan got to call the shots?
I’ve had this idea in my head for a few months now. Near the beginning of the year I set myself the task of watching all ninety-six Best Picture winners just for bragging rights and my own completionist mind. At the time of writing I’ve watched sixty-six. I’m not watching them in chronological order, rather using a random spin the wheel generator to decide the order. However, in persuing this challenge, I can’t help but look at what the competition of each film was in their respective year. How did The Greatest Show on Earth win in 1952, the same year that Singin’ in the Rain was released?! It doesn’t make sense.
This is where Letterboxd comes into it. After viewing each Best Picture winner, I’ll log it on Letterboxd with a rating out of five stars (half stars included). As well as my own rating, this will add to the film’s average general rating from every user. So I decided to go through each year of the Academy Awards looking at the highest average rating within that year.
The Rules:
A film is eligible in whatever year it is released (an example of where the Academy differs is when it is released in the US)
A film must have over a thousand reviews/ratings to qualify
It must be a narrative feature-length film and does not include documentaries, concert films, shorts or limited series.
The Results
The Crossovers: Out of a possible ninety-six, the real Oscars and the Letterboxd Oscars only have ten crossover winners as recent as Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) winning in both occasions. Both The Godfather (1972) and Part II (1974) are still part of the canon as well as classics All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), It Happened One Night (1934) and Casablanca (1943). From the ten, the most surprising is 2006’s The Departed. While I personally love it, I’ve seen other people say it’s not amongst Scorsese’s best films. Whether I’m just wrong about that perception or if it’s the best from a weaker year is up for debate. Regardless, the lack of crossover is a clear sign of the dividing opinions of movie fans and the Academy voters throughout the years.
A Worldwide Awards: The Academy has a tenancy to reward films in the English language more than international features. Yes, there has been a Best International Feature category since 1947 but only on eighteen occasions has an international film been nominated for Best Picture. In fact, it took until Parasite (2019) for a non-English film to win Best Picture. But that’s just one out of ninety-six. In the Letterboxd timeline, a whopping thirty-eight films (not including silent films) international films would win the top prize from countries like France, Germany, Iran, Brazil, Taiwan, Greece, Sweden, Russia, Denmark, and especially Japan on top of South Korea’s win for Parasite.
Getting their Due: Some of the most acclaimed and influential directors never came close to winning an Oscar for their efforts. Someone like Akira Kurosawa was only nominated once for Best Director for Ran (1985) before the Academy did a cop out by giving him a non-competitive Honorary Award just a few years later. While it isn’t always the case that the film which wins Best Picture also wins Best Director, if we say that they do then Kurosawa would end his career with five golden statues to his name along with making the best film of the year. Silent film icon, Charlie Chaplin, would rack up three competitive wins between 1931-1940. Cinephile favourite, Stanley Kubrick should and would have a Directing Oscar for Barry Lyndon (1975) along with his Visual Effects Oscar for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Alfred Hitchcock, though his film Rebecca (1940) did actually win Best Picture he was denied the Director win, would seal the deal with a more iconic Hitchcock film, Vertigo (1958). Christopher Nolan wouldn’t have had to wait until Oppenheimer (2023) for his flowers as he would’ve won fifteen years earlier for the film which many think he should have been victorious and is ultimately the reason that the Best Picture category doubled from five to ten nominees, The Dark Knight (2008).
More than a Medium: If you thought international films were getting shut out of Best Picture, the track record for animated films being nominated is even more alarming. Feature length animated films have been around since the 1930s with Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Since then, animated films have only ever been nominated three times with Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1991), Up (2009) and Toy Story 3 (2010). However, using the Letterboxd method, seven animated films would not only have been nominated but win too. Most interesting of all is none of them are Disney or Pixar properties. Japanese Anime leads the way with four wins while Sony’s Spider-Verse franchise goes two for two. We’ll have to wait to see if Beyond the Spider-Verse caps off the trilogy with another win this year.
Black and White is Still Alright: While the majority of movies were filmed in black and white up until the Technicolor extravaganzas of the 1950s, the first coloured film to win Best Picture was Gone with the Wind (1939). A total of twenty-eight black and white films have won the top prize, the most recent being 2011’s The Artist. In the Letterboxd universe, the number goes up to forty-one films. The first film in colour comes nine years after reality with Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes (1948), the latest film being as recent as 2015’s Embrace of the Serpent. Between 1950-1969, only five film out of twenty were black and white Best Picture winners whereas the Letterboxd timeline remarkably gives the exact opposite results of only five coloured films, only one in the whole 1950s (Vertigo).
No Genre Biases: The term “Oscar Bait” gets thrown around a lot for films that look like they’re actively trying to gain the attention of voters. Whether that be the subject matter of the film (illness, racism, class), actors putting themselves through hell to portray an authentic performance (losing/gaining weight, enduring harsh conditions) or even the genre of film (war, biopic, family drama). Academy voters tend to like more serious dramas and period pieces where they can see the craft on screen. Not to say that other genres don’t have any merit, far from it. Many of the greatest movies of all time would be considered a “genre film”; whether that be horror, comedy or science fiction. The only Best Picture winner with horror elements came in 1991 with The Silence of the Lambs while only a handful of comedies have won. Everything Everywhere is possibly the closest thing to a sci-fi film winning. The Letterboxd Oscars caters to many genres including silent comedies, spaghetti westerns and samurai films. Hell, the first film that wins is an all out sci-fi film in Metropolis (1927) and it only gets more genre heavy with The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). An Academy favourite, films in the musical genre have been awarded Best Picture eight times in its history, including six times between 1952-1968. The Letterboxd timeline sees just one musical take it and even then it’s The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), a Jacques Demy French film which was only ever nominated for its score.
Settling Scores: Thanks to the Letterboxd canon, some of the most egregious Best Picture wins have been rectified. Orson Welles’ textbook film, Citizen Kane wins over How Green was My Valley in 1941, Spike Lee comes out on top in 1989 as Do the Right Thing trumps Driving Miss Daisy and the infamous title of “worst Best Picture winner” no longer belongs to 2005’s Crash as Brokeback Mountain rightfully claims its place amongst the winners circle.
While this might seem like a more representative group of Best Picture winners, it’s important to acknowledge that these choices have only been made within the past thirteen years or so since people have been using Letterboxd. Those rating films on the platform have the benefit of hindsight on their side and a wealth of past film discourse to fall back on. Of course the general consensus will be that Citizen Kane should’ve won or Kurosawa was owed more accolades. Those voting on the real Oscars don’t have the power to see what will still be a worthy winner decades from now so can only make a judgement call in the moment. Also, with it being a social platform I imagine the average age demographic is younger than the average age of Academy voters. The chances are younger users maybe haven’t seen as many older films and those that they have seen will be part of film classes in college/university courses. Hence why industry titans like Chaplin, Kurosawa, Fritz Lang and Sergio Leone pop up so frequently. As someone in their mid-twenties with a film degree, I came across some winners which I’d never even heard of when doing the research. Many of which have since moved onto my watchlist on Letterboxd.
As we move closer to the end of the first century of the Academy Awards, maybe the next hundred years will start to look similar to the Letterboxd canon.