Well, prepare for a dream come true, because when I woke up I created that comparison in real life, using my old standby, IMDB data. I also brought in Wikipedia data, because it looks like IMDB doesn't publish any machine-readable information about awards or nominations. Wikipedia doesn't either, but you may have heard of a little library called Beautiful Soup.
Without further ado, here's the table. Well, I need a little more ado to explain what the headings mean.
Ok, "Alignment". Take 1941 as an example. There were ten Best Picture nominees in 1941 (although it was called something different back then). So we take the top ten movies of 1941 by IMDB rating. Six of the Best Picture nominees are also in the top ten by IMDB rating, so the alignment for 1941 is 60%. At the other extreme, none of the five 1983 Best Picture nominees are in the IMDB top five for that year, so the alignment for 1983 is 0%.
For a few years I couldn't calculate BPrank, generally because the IMDB year of the Oscar winner differs from the year it won an Oscar. Early on this happens a lot because until 1933 the Academy Awards covered parts of two years. That's why "All Quiet on the Western Front" got the nod in the 1929 Oscars, and then showed up as the best-rated IMDB film of 1930. The "1929" Oscars weren't just held in 1930, they actually covered some movies released in 1930. But sometimes the dates just don't match up. Casablanca is the top-rated film of 1942 and the winner of the 1943 Oscar. This still happens: The Hurt Locker won Best Picture in 2009 but IMDB says it was released in 2008. In most cases I was able to find the year the film was released, according to IMDB, and put down down its ranking within that year for BPrank.
My dataset excludes TV shows, video games, direct-to-video releases, and shorts. (Excluding shorts required cross-referencing against IMDB's genre.list file.) I also excluded movies with fewer than 150 votes on IMDB. I did what I could to exclude movies that are mainly concert footage, although Freebird... The Movie still made it on there. I did not exclude documentaries or foreign films.
Finally, to fulfil the promise of this post's title. According to IMDB, the worst movie ever to win Best Picture is 1930/1931's winner, "Cimmaron" (IMDB:6.3). But if you look relative to what else came out the same year, the worst Best Picture is "Chicago" (IMDB:7.5), which IMDB data ranks at the 155th-best movie of 2002. However you look at it, the best movie ever to win Best Picture is 1974's The Godfather: Part II (IMDB:9.00).
PS: Why are the Oscar nominees linked and the IMDB champions not linked? Because IMDB DATASET DOESN'T INCLUDE ANY URLS ARGH.
PPS: I did something similar for board games as part of Loaded Dice. I called it the "People's Spiel des Jahres." I didn't put up the table because the results were uninterestingly full of wargames. But wargames generally don't get nominated for Spiel des Jahres, so maybe I should exclude them and try it again.
Thu Mar 08 2012 13:20 Worst Best Picture:
Last night I dreamed I was teaching a college-level class on the history of film. Despite my total lack of qualifications, the class went well, because I focused more on film metadata than on history or craft. One of the things I did in dream-class was compare different measures of film quality, as I've been doing recently on NYCB with TV shows. In particular, I compared the winner of each year's Best Picture Oscar to IMDB's highest-rated movie of that year.
Year Best Picture BPIMDB BPrank Best IMDB Rating BIRIMDB BIRnom Alignment 1927 Wings 7.80 #9 Metropolis 8.40 0% 1928 The Broadway Melody 6.50 #8 La passion de Jeanne d'Arc 8.30 0% 1929 All Quiet on the Western Front 8.10 #1 Chelovek s kino-apparatom 8.40 0% 1930 Cimarron 6.30 #20 All Quiet on the Western Front 8.10 0% 1931 Grand Hotel 7.70 #11 City Lights 8.60 12% 1932 Cavalcade 6.40 #24 Trouble in Paradise 8.20 10% 1934 It Happened One Night 8.30 #1 It Happened One Night 8.30 ✓✓ 25% 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty 7.90 #4 A Night at the Opera 8.10 41% 1936 The Great Ziegfeld 6.90 #57 Modern Times 8.50 30% 1937 The Life of Emile Zola 7.40 #31 La grande illusion 8.20 50% 1938 You Can't Take It With You 8.00 #4 The Lady Vanishes 8.10 30% 1939 Gone with the Wind 8.20 #3 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington 8.40 ✓ 40% 1940 Rebecca 8.40 #1 Rebecca 8.40 ✓✓ 40% 1941 How Green Was My Valley 7.90 #7 Citizen Kane 8.60 ✓ 60% 1942 Mrs. Miniver 7.70 #12 Casablanca 8.80 30% 1943 Casablanca 8.80 #1 The Ox-Bow Incident 8.20 ✓ 30% 1944 Going My Way 7.40 #31 Double Indemnity 8.60 ✓ 20% 1945 The Lost Weekend 8.10 #4 Les enfants du paradis 8.30 20% 1946 The Best Years of Our Lives 8.30 #2 It's a Wonderful Life 8.70 ✓ 40% 1947 Gentleman's Agreement 7.40 #25 Out of the Past 8.10 0% 1948 Hamlet 7.90 #12 Ladri di biciclette 8.50 40% 1949 All the King's Men 7.60 #18 The Third Man 8.50 20% 1950 All About Eve 8.50 #2 Sunset Blvd. 8.70 20% 1951 An American in Paris 7.30 #44 Strangers on a Train 8.30 0% 1952 The Greatest Show on Earth 6.70 #86 Singin' in the Rain 8.40 20% 1953 From Here to Eternity 7.90 #10 Le salaire de la peur 8.30 0% 1954 On the Waterfront 8.40 #3 Shichinin no samurai 8.80 20% 1955 Marty 7.70 #18 Les diaboliques 8.30 0% 1956 Around the World in 80 Days 6.8 ? The Killing 8.20 0% 1957 The Bridge on the River Kwai 8.40 #5 12 Angry Men 8.90 ✓ 60% 1958 Gigi 6.90 #77 Vertigo 8.50 20% 1959 Ben-Hur 8.20 #5 Ningen no jôken 8.80 20% 1960 The Apartment 8.40 #2 Psycho 8.70 20% 1961 West Side Story 7.70 #28 Ningen no jôken 8.80 20% 1962 Lawrence of Arabia 8.50 #1 Lawrence of Arabia 8.50 ✓✓ 40% 1963 Tom Jones 7.00 #74 Pour la suite du monde 8.50 0% 1964 My Fair Lady 7.90 #15 The T.A.M.I. Show 8.40 0% 1965 The Sound of Music 7.90 #20 Obyknovennyy fashizm 8.40 0% 1966 A Man for All Seasons 8.00 #8 Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo. 9.00 20% 1967 In the Heat of the Night 8.00 #8 Cool Hand Luke 8.30 20% 1968 Oliver! 7.50 #41 C'era una volta il West 8.80 20% 1969 Midnight Cowboy 8.00 #8 Le chagrin et la pitié 8.40 20% 1970 Patton 8.10 #4 Brigada Diverse intra în actiune 8.10 20% 1971 The French Connection 7.90 #12 A Clockwork Orange 8.50 ✓ 20% 1972 The Godfather 9.20 #1 The Godfather 9.20 ✓✓ 20% 1973 The Sting 8.40 #1 The Sting 8.40 ✓✓ 20% 1974 The Godfather Part II 9.00 #1 The Godfather: Part II 9.00 ✓✓ 40% 1975 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest 8.90 #2 Hababam sinifi 9.00 40% 1976 Rocky 8.10 #8 Tosun Pasa 8.70 20% 1977 Annie Hall 8.20 #9 Star Wars 8.80 ✓ 20% 1978 The Deer Hunter 8.20 #5 Selvi boylum, al yazmalim 8.50 20% 1979 Kramer vs. Kramer 7.70 #27 Apocalypse Now 8.60 ✓ 20% 1980 Ordinary People 7.90 #8 The Shining 8.50 40% 1981 Chariots of Fire 7.20 #74 Raiders of the Lost Ark 8.70 ✓ 20% 1982 Gandhi 8.10 #8 Maratonci trce pocasni krug 8.40 0% 1983 Terms of Endearment 7.40 #42 El sur 8.20 0% 1984 Amadeus 8.40 #4 Balkanski spijun 8.50 20% 1985 Out of Africa 7.00 #83 Zügürt Aga 8.50 0% 1986 Platoon 8.20 #4 Aliens 8.50 20% 1987 The Last Emperor 7.80 #17 Muhsin Bey 8.40 0% 1988 Rain Man 8.00 #12 Nuovo Cinema Paradiso 8.50 0% 1989 Driving Miss Daisy 7.40 #45 Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade 8.30 0% 1990 Dances with Wolves 8.00 #3 Goodfellas 8.80 ✓ 40% 1991 The Silence of the Lambs 8.70 #1 The Silence of the Lambs 8.70 ✓✓ 60% 1992 Unforgiven 8.30 #3 Reservoir Dogs 8.40 20% 1993 Schindler's List 8.90 #1 Schindler's List 8.90 ✓✓ 40% 1994 Forrest Gump 8.70 #4 The Shawshank Redemption 9.20 ✓ 60% 1995 Braveheart 8.40 #3 Se7en 8.70 20% 1996 The English Patient 7.30 #73 Freebird... The Movie 8.30 20% 1997 Titanic 7.40 #51 La vita è bella 8.50 20% 1998 Shakespeare in Love 7.30 #83 American History X 8.60 20% 1999 American Beauty 8.60 #3 Fight Club 8.80 60% 2000 Gladiator 8.40 #3 Memento 8.70 20% 2001 A Beautiful Mind 8.00 #13 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring 8.80 ✓ 20% 2002 Chicago 7.30 #155 The Last Just Man 9.40 40% 2003 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King 8.80 #1 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King 8.80 ✓✓ 20% 2004 Million Dollar Baby 8.20 #7 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind 8.50 0% 2005 Crash 8.50 #12 Babam Ve Oglum 8.70 0% 2006 The Departed 8.50 #3 Das Leben der Anderen 8.50 20% 2007 No Country for Old Men 8.20 #8 Jogo de Cena 8.70 0% 2008 Slumdog Millionaire 8.20 #7 The Dark Knight 8.90 0% 2009 The Hurt Locker 7.80 #30 Puskás Hungary 8.60 30% 2010 The King's Speech 8.30 #17 Inception 8.90 ✓ 20% 2011 The Artist 8.20 #15 Drive 9.00 0%
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