The Revenant is the worst film nominated for Best Picture this year. And it will probably win the Oscar.
“The worst” isn’t just an arbitrary opinion on the film’s strange emotional distance and beautifully shot boringness; it’s a collective consensus. It has the lowest score on Metacritic, which aggregates a film’s reviews, of all eight Best Picture nominees. And yet, it will probably win the award.
The truth is that this is the first year in decades where the Best Picture category is actually unpredictable, which perhaps explains why a film as poorly reviewed as The Revenant could end up winning.
If it does, it will be a history-making moment in the category. No, not because the worst nominee won Best Picture—that happens with shocking routine (Crash, A Beautiful Mind, Dances With Wolves…)—but because it will have defied statistics. And if you can’t count on statistics, what can you count on?!
All the benchmarks we prognosticators usually use to predict Best Picture are all bunk this year. In a rare instance of Oscars excitement, Spotlight, The Revenant, and The Big Short all stand very real shots of winning Best Picture.
Traditionally, previous wins from the guilds—the Directors Guild, Producers Guild, Screen Actors Guild—factor along with key nominations in non-Best Picture categories to statistically predict Best Picture, typically with great success.
Because important precursor wins were split up among those top contenders and this year’s Oscar nominations are all over the map, people favoring The Revenant for the trophy are operating on their gut, its late-breaking momentum, and anecdotal evidence from voters.
Bear with us, now, while we nerd out on stats and Oscars history, in an attempt to explain why the Best Picture race is uncharacteristically thrilling this year. And then, more importantly, why the category has become utterly meaningless.
In other words—with The Revenant possibly joining the esteemed company of Birdman, The Artist, The King’s Speech, and more—why the Best Picture category reliably sucks.
Still, there’s hope yet! Here are all the reasons odds say The Revenant shouldn’t win Best Picture.
