Every year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences creates a Hollywood spectacle to honor the best films, actors, screenwriters, directors, and more. Before the Academy rolls out the red carpet on February 28 to announce 2016’s Oscar winners, we decided to roll out the red pen (metaphorically speaking) and rank the movies, actors, and actresses by how well their fans write when they’re buzzing about them online.
First, we looked at fan-written movie reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. We gathered the most recent one hundred four- and five-star reviews of at least fifteen words for each film, analyzed them with Grammarly, and then verified them with a team of live proofreaders. We counted only black-and-white mistakes, such as misspellings, wrong and missing punctuation, misused or missing words, and subject-verb disagreement. We ignored stylistic variations, such as common slang words, nicknames, serial commas, or the use of numerals instead of spelled-out numbers.
Then, we set out for IMDb and followed the same procedure to rank the Best Actor/Actress and Best Supporting Actor/Actress nominees according to how well IMDb commenters wrote when they discussed them in the forums. We also searched out the top three adjectives or phrases commenters used to describe the celebs.
Leonardo DiCaprio may be the odds-on favorite to win an Oscar for The Revenant, but the “amazing, desperate guy,” who has yet to score an Oscar, didn’t fare well in our research, coming in second-to-last—just above Sylvester Stallone, who’s nominated for Best Supporting Actor for Creed. Although Variety predicts that The Big Short will walk away with the gleaming golden statue for Best Picture, where fan grammar is concerned, Brooklyn takes the win.
Of course, our research is all in the name of fun and good grammar. To see who really gets to step up to the microphone and say “I’d like to thank the Academy,” you’ll have to tune in to the 88th Academy Awards on Sunday, February 28.
