These Oscar-nominated movies are soooo disappointing

On Sunday, the Oscars will once again be awarded to some of the best movies, actors, and creatives in the world. The nominees range from the sci-fi epic Dune II to an indie drama about the fictional Brutalist architect László Tóth. I don’t have any personal favourite because at the time of writing I have not watched any of the nominated movies (though I intend to watch several of them when I get around to it). But I fully expect to be disappointed by some of them.

Nominees for the 2025 Best Picture Oscars

Source: USA Today

It’s not just me who frequently experiences disappointment when watching supposedly great movies. Sometimes these Oscar-nominated movies are objectively terrible and didn’t deserve to be nominated in the first place (e.g. the Barbie movie or Top Gun Maverick – don’t argue with me). But in many cases, the movie just doesn’t seem to live up to the hype.

According to an analysis by Michelangelo Rossi and Felix Schleef this is an experience that many people share. They looked at the viewer ratings in the movie databases Movie-Lens and IMDb they found that in the weeks after a movie gets nominated for an Oscar, the viewer ratings drop compared to movies that don’t get nominated.

Difference in viewer ratings between nominated and non-nominated movies before and after the nomination

Source: Rossi and Schleef (2025)

The driver behind this disappointment with nominated movies is the good old anchoring effect.

Let’s face it, most of us aren’t professional actors, directors, or film critics. We don’t really know the difference between a good movie and a truly great movie. We can obviously differentiate between a decent movie and a terrible one but when it comes to awards like the Oscars, one has to differentiate between a group of movies that are all very good. Except when Barbie or Top Gun Maverick are nominated, because then there are nine very good movies nominated and one pile of manure.

In the instances when we don’t know which movie is the best of the nominated ones, we rely on simple heuristics. In the case of wine this is famously the price of the bottle and the label on it (more expensive wines are rated as better-tasting). In the case of movies, it is whether the movie is nominated for an award.

And if we go see an award-nominated movie we have higher expectations. The result is that the movie, which objectively may be a very good movie, just can’t live up to the expectation we have. And in these cases, we leave the theatre feeling like we just wasted two hours of our life (or 3 hours 35 minutes if you watched the Brutalist).

So have a little sympathy with the people who don’t win the Oscars on Sunday. They may have been paid millions to make a movie, but they have to both suffer the disappointment of not having won and live with the fact that their movie will be rated worse by viewers than if it had never been nominated in the first place. It’s a tough life.