Best Oscar Years by Average Nomination IMDB Score
Often times the winner of Best Picture Academy Award gets all the highlights, rankings, and comparisons, but for this list I wanted to take a look at all the nominated films and how they compared to each other. I wanted to find out:
What Year had the best (and worst) Oscar Best Picture Nominees?
To compile this list, I averaged out the IMDB scores for every single film from the Best Picture category from 1929 to 2024 and ranked them below:
It’s not surprising that 1994 comes out on top, featuring the three-headed monster of Pulp Fiction, Shawshank Redemption, and Forrest Gump dueling against one another.
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Considering, however, that certain years have more nominees, I decided to create a Logarithm that weighs those years accordingly. It is more impressive to have a high score with ten films competing versus those with five.
Here are the updated results below:
Even with the adjustment, 1994 still wins out. Key differences include 2019 jumping up from the sixth spot to the fourth. It boasted an incredible roster of films such as 1917, Parasite, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. 2014 had the largest jump (8 slots), and four years were tied with the biggest drops (5).
*IMDB scores update multiple times daily. Averages likely to change over time.
Thank you for reading,
-Brian Mazzarella
