7th Annual Golden Tomato Awards
Each year Rotten Tomatoes has their "Golden Tomato Awards" for the best-reviewed films of the year. These awards are based on what percentage of critics give the film a positive rating and how many reviews the movie actually got. The awards are split up into Wide Releases and Limited Releases.
I must say, the Wide Release category is rather startling, especially the top 7. What do you think would be high up on it? Walk the Line? The Constant Gardener? Munich? Crash? Sin City? Nope, the top 7 is popcorn entertainment after popcorn entertainment...
1. Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
3. Batman Begins
4. King Kong
5. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
6. Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
7. The 40 Year-Old Virgin
You have to get to #8 before you find Cinderella Man and to #10 before you find a Best Picture Oscar contender (Walk the Line).
Perhaps this is indicative of an imperfect system that Rotten Tomatoes uses, but I think it also shows just how many Oscar contenders this year are limited releases. And I also think it's weird how the best-reviewed wide release films are dominated by pure entertainment value films, including 4 sequels (of sorts) and 2 remakes. For comparison, the top 7 of 2004 at least included Hero, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and The Aviator (along with 3 sequels and The Incredibles).
I wish there was a way to customize RT for myself so that only ratings by critics who participated in Village Voice's "Take 1" through "Take 7" polls were counted. Those year-end polls always line up with my own tastes far better than any other single critic or aggregation.
I think it's because wide releases are inevitably going to be more widely reviewed, and this was a good year for mainstream entertainment. I think it also demonstrates the big gap between the two cultures.
I stopped using Rotten Tomatoes when they began posting links to reviews by numbskulls at Ain't It Cool and other fanboy sites. Metacritic isn't perfect, but it is a much better tool than Tomatoes.
I like Rotten Tomatoes and I use it sometimes to get a quick feel for how well a movie is being received. But I think from a mathematical standpoint there is an inherent flaw in their simplistic formula.
You can't compare a film with 20 reviews that received 18 positive reviews (giving it a tomato rating of 90%) with a movie that was reviewed 150 times and given 135 positive reviews (giving it a tomato rating of 90%).
They need to have some sort of weighting system like IMDB.
Oops, I just realized that they are using some sort of weighting system now.
Yeah, they do for the Golden Tomato Awards.