Topic: WorldNetDaily
In his Jan. 23 WorldNetDaily column complaining that "the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has ignored the most popular movies of the year in favor of R-rated box office wimps as their nominees for Best Picture," Ted Baehr writes:
Only "The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button" slipped in under the bar with a PG-13 rating. Accordingly, it's made more money than all the others combined, even though it was only released on Christmas Day.
[...]
At the close of business in 2008, the Best Picture nominees ranked as follows:
"The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button" (38th)
"Slumdog Millionaire" (103rd)
"Milk" (128th)
"Frost/Nixon" (179th)
"The Reader" (205th)
Aside from making the fallacious assumption that a movie's box office take is directly proportional to its quality, Baehr is making an apples-and-oranges comparison between the Oscar-nominated films.
Yes, "Benjamin Button" "made more money than all the others combined," but that's because, according to Box Office Mojo, it received a wide opening-weekend release, on 2,988 screens. By contrast, here are the widest 2008 weekend release numbers for the remaining contenders:
- "Slumdog Millionaire": 614 screens
- "Milk": 356 screens
- "Frost/Nixon": 205 screens
- "The Reader": 116 screens
Baehr also smears most of these films; "Milk" and "Frost/Nixon" are denigrated as "obligatory R-rated panderings to the radical left" (with "MIlk" being further called a "gay propaganda film" -- yeah, watching a gay man get shot to death is a useful recruiting tool) while "The Reader" is summarized as being "a pornographic tale about an escaped, female Nazi war criminal seducing a 15-year-old boy!" Baehr seems to have missed the point of all of those movies. "Slumdog Millionaire," though, seems to have escaped Baehr's offhand, uninformed denigration beyond its rating.
