1975 Poll: SCFZ does the Oscars
Posted: Sun May 02, 2021 11:58 am
Overview:
We often deride the Oscars for many reasons, and the question I thought a poll could answer is: how often do they get it right? Do they pick the right winner (by SCFZ opinion) from the choices? Do they pick the right choices to begin with?
So the poll is in two parts:
• poll #1: from their nominees, we'll pick a Best Picture.
--> to vote in this poll, award to every nominee you've seen a rating from 1 to 5 stars
--> you should assign ratings as follows (do not use your ordinary ratings scale) :
5 stars: in the top 10% of best picture nominees from this decade
4 stars: in the top 30%
3 stars: in the middle
2 stars: in the bottom 30%
1 star: in the bottom 10%
So if you generally dislike Best Picture nominees (as I do!), you should still be giving roughly one film per year (when they nominate 8-10) a 5-star rating, and only one or two a 1-star rating. I'm encouraging ratings like this so we're not measuring whether generous voters have seen a film, but how a film, in SCFZ's view, ranks against its competition. The film with the highest average rating will win our parallel Best Picture (from the nominees). The nominees are (copy/pasting from this list is preferable to me than typing things up from scratch) :
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman)
Jaws (Steven Spielberg)
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick)
Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet)
Nashville (Robert Altman)
• poll #2: what should the Academy have nominated? for this poll, you can list up to 5 films that should have received a Best Picture nomination but did not. From these nominations, I'll count up the film with the most mentions, and it will win our alternative Best Picture, and I'll also compile a slate of alternative nominees. The point is not to pick our favourite films of the year (that's what the year poll is for). The point is to pick only films that you might reasonably expect could have been nominated in real life. So bear in mind that foreign films are nominated on average about once every seven years, and those that are have a particular character. Most nominations should be English-language productions, and probably none should be all that experimental.
In the end, I might have a runoff vote to decide whether we prefer our Best Picture (from the nominees), or our alternative Best Picture, but I haven't thought that far ahead.
We often deride the Oscars for many reasons, and the question I thought a poll could answer is: how often do they get it right? Do they pick the right winner (by SCFZ opinion) from the choices? Do they pick the right choices to begin with?
So the poll is in two parts:
• poll #1: from their nominees, we'll pick a Best Picture.
--> to vote in this poll, award to every nominee you've seen a rating from 1 to 5 stars
--> you should assign ratings as follows (do not use your ordinary ratings scale) :
5 stars: in the top 10% of best picture nominees from this decade
4 stars: in the top 30%
3 stars: in the middle
2 stars: in the bottom 30%
1 star: in the bottom 10%
So if you generally dislike Best Picture nominees (as I do!), you should still be giving roughly one film per year (when they nominate 8-10) a 5-star rating, and only one or two a 1-star rating. I'm encouraging ratings like this so we're not measuring whether generous voters have seen a film, but how a film, in SCFZ's view, ranks against its competition. The film with the highest average rating will win our parallel Best Picture (from the nominees). The nominees are (copy/pasting from this list is preferable to me than typing things up from scratch) :
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman)
Jaws (Steven Spielberg)
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick)
Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet)
Nashville (Robert Altman)
• poll #2: what should the Academy have nominated? for this poll, you can list up to 5 films that should have received a Best Picture nomination but did not. From these nominations, I'll count up the film with the most mentions, and it will win our alternative Best Picture, and I'll also compile a slate of alternative nominees. The point is not to pick our favourite films of the year (that's what the year poll is for). The point is to pick only films that you might reasonably expect could have been nominated in real life. So bear in mind that foreign films are nominated on average about once every seven years, and those that are have a particular character. Most nominations should be English-language productions, and probably none should be all that experimental.
In the end, I might have a runoff vote to decide whether we prefer our Best Picture (from the nominees), or our alternative Best Picture, but I haven't thought that far ahead.