Do Animated Features Need To Win Over Critics To Receive An Oscar Nomination? A Look At The Data.

As we await to find out this year’s Oscar nominations, we wanted to examine the relationship between critics’ reactions to animated features and whether this is an indicator of whether a film will receive an Oscar nomination.

To do this, we collected Rotten Tomato Tomatometer scores for every film that was nominated for best animated feature over the past decade.

Rotten Tomatoes, which is owned by NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. Discovery, defines the score as “the percentage of professional critic reviews that are positive for a given film or television show.” Very simply, let’s say a film receives 100 reviews and 75 of those reviews are positive. The film then has a 75% critical score.

Not anyone can submit a review. Each critic and/or publication is vetted beforehand and must go through an application process to become “Tomatometer approved.” In our research, we’ve also included the audience score for each film, although this data is less reliable because sometimes the scores are verified (RT has proof that voters have seen the film) and sometimes they are not, which means the score could potentially be manipulated and should be viewed with greater skepticism.

Here are the RT scores from both critics and audiences for some of this year’s key contending films:

2023 Key Oscar Contenders

Some takeaways from the list:

• The average score among this year’s contenders is 83%.
• Some of the critically highest-rated films on the list – Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem and Suzume – have won few, if any, end-of-year awards.
• Robot Dreams is the highest-scoring film among this year’s contenders at 100%. That said, the film only has 25 critic’s reviews on RT, while a film like The Boy and the Heron has retained a 97% positive rating from over 240 reviews.
• The lowest-scoring contenders are Disney’s Wish (48%) and The Super Mario Bros. Movie (59%), both of which have already scored high-profile nominations at other major ceremonies this year.

To give some context now, here is the last decade of Oscar animated feature nominees and how they were received by critics and audiences, followed by some takeaways:

2022

2021

2020

2019

2018

2017

2016

2015

2014

2013

• The films which eventually won the award had an average score of 94.9%.
• The average score of all nominees was actually higher than that, at 95.68%.
• The lowest score for any winner was shared by Frozen and Big Hero 6 at 90%.
• With few exceptions, it’s rare for films panned by critics to receive Oscar nominations. The lowest-scoring film to pick up a nomination was The Boss Baby at 53%. Disney’s Wish currently has an RT critics score of 48% and would take that distinction from The Boss Baby if it gets a nomination.
• If Robot Dreams receives a nomination this year, it would become just the second film with a 100% Rotten Tomato score to do so. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya is currently the only film from the past decade with a perfect 100% score to get a nomination.