Why Oscar Nominees?

If you look at the AFI's Top 100 Films list or They Shoot Pictures, Don't They's 1,000 Most Acclaimed Films list, few of the top movies actually won the Best Picture award that year. In fact for the latter publication, only four of the first fifty ranked films won the most coveted Oscar.

So why are we using the Oscar Nominees instead of Metacritic scores (the amateur film critic's version of the more widely used RottenTomatoes)? Quite simply, because it worked last year.

Of the Oscar-nominated movies we saw last year, I felt like all of them except for two (WALL-E and Rachel Getting Married) were good to great:

The Wrestler 4
Doubt 4
The Dark Knight 4
Frozen River 4
The Reader 4
Slumdog Millionaire 4
Vicky Cristina Barcelona 3 1/2
Milk 3 1/2
The Visitor 3 1/2
Frost/Nixon 3
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button 3
Changeling 3
Revolutionary Road 3
In Bruges 2 1/2
WALL-E 2
Rachel Getting Married 2

Did not see
Tropic Thunder (best supporting actor nomination)
Happy-Go-Lucky

So maybe our movie preferences are in line with what mainstream Hollywood/snooty America likes. We're never going to like Eagle Eye, The Proposal, or Paul Blart, Mall Cop (all in the top 15 Netflix most rented movies of 2009). Maybe we'll miss a bit. But 14/16 movies in the 2.5-4 star range was good enough for me.