A few years ago, I wrote a series of posts going through the Oscars year-by-year to compare the Best Picture selectees to the films preferred by either IMDB users or the consensus of history as the best picture of the year.

Part I went from 1928 to 1952 and covered the very shaky early years of the Academy.

Part II covered 1952 to 1978, from the days when the Academy went out of their way to snub Hitchcock to the 1970’s, when they did a very good job.

Part III covered 1978 to 2012, which has been a shaky period for the Academy as they struggle to adapt to the broader palette of films that has opened up. Occasionally, they make a good choice, but then they scuttle back to safe fare like The King’s Speech.

Part IV summed up and ranked the worst Oscar picks in history. I concluded that the Academy had done an OK job, mostly, but was slowly becoming irrelevant.

That was a fun series of posts to write and even now, I like to go through it occasionally. A few updates are in order though:

In the post, I stopped tapping films as “Consensus Picks” in 2001, saying that not enough time had passed. It’s been three years, so I’ll bring that up to 2005.

Year: 2002
Academy Pick: Chicago
IMDB Rating: 7.2 (41 out of 132, minimum 25000 votes)
IMDB pick as Best Picture: The Two Towers
Consensus Best Picture: City of God
Comment: You can check the original post for my comments on Lord of the Rings. City of God continues to be held in high esteem, deservedly so. Chicago, however, keeps sinking. I rated this as one of their worst picks, even given IMDB’s bias against musicals.

Year: 2003
Academy Pick: Return of the King
IMDB Rating: 8.9 (1st of 111, minimum 25000 votes)
IMDB pick as Best Picture: Return of the King
Consensus Best Picture: Return of the King
Comment: A number of good pictures are creeping up in the IMDB ratings but I think most people would conclude that LOTR was the best movie of 2003.

Year: 2004
Academy Pick: Million Dollar Baby
IMDB Rating: 8.1 (7 of 143, minimum 25000 votes)
IMDB pick as Best Picture: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Consensus Best Picture: Still unclear. Sunshine might be it. But I suspect The Incredibles will be history’s favorite.

Year: 2005
Academy Pick: Crash
IMDB Rating: 7.9 (18 of 143 for 2004, minimum 25000 votes)
IMDB pick as Best Picture: Batman Begins
Consensus Best Picture: Still unclear.
Comment: I thought maybe I’d exclude this year as being too recent, but … 2006 has Pan’s Labyrinth and 2008 has The Dark Knight. So I’m coming to think it was weak year.Crash remains well-regarded by IMDB but its reputation is terrible.

Not much has changed for the other years. The Departed, Like Stars on Earth, the Dark Knight, Inglorious Basterds, Inception, The Intouchables and The Dark Knight Rises still rule their respective years.

For the years since, with the threshold raised to 50k votes:

Year: 2013
Academy Pick: 12 Years A Slave
IMDB Rating: 8.1 (3 of 127, minimum 50000 votes)
IMDB pick as Best Picture: The Wolf of Wall Street

Year: 2014
Academy Pick: Birdman
IMDB Rating: 7.8 (17 of 96, minimum 50000 votes)
IMDB pick as Best Picture: Interstellar
Comment: There’s a lot of fanboyism in recent IMDB ratings, so I might discount Interstellar, a movie I really like, and pick Whiplash, which is the #2 IMDB-rated film and might have been my pick for the best movie of the year. I know it’s only been a year, but Birdman’s ranking is terrible for a recent Best Picture. I liked it but I think it was a poor pick. Hollywood loves movies about Hollywood and acting. Three of the recent Best Pictures were about Hollywood. But give it five years and I think Birdman will start showing up on lists of bad Academy picks. Still, it could have been worse. They could have gone with The Imitation Game.

Year: 2015
Academy Pick: TBA. Right now, The Revenant is the favorite.
IMDB Rating: 8.2 (4 of 58, minimum 50000 votes)
IMDB pick as Best Picture: Baahubali: The Beginning. But that’s Bollywood again. The top-rated American IMDB film is The Force Awakens, but that’s fanboyism. Inside Out is #3. We’ll go with that for now.

So has anything changed in the last three years? I don’t think so. The Academy has still shown that are vulnerable to Oscar bait. They are nominating more action movies like Mad Max but they clearly aren’t going to be giving out the top prize for those movies. They’ve made at least one pick — Birdman — that may soon join the ranks of poor Oscar picks. And they continue to ignore alternative fare like Straight Outta Compton or Ex Machina.

So … if you like award ceremonies or you like the horse race or you like glamor, by all means watch the Academy Awards this weekend. But don’t watch it because you want to know what the best movie was. There are so many more resources available now, of which IMDB is just one.