The Worst 538 Article?

I love 538, but this was pretty terrible.

Here's where it all goes wrong:

"First, let’s check out his credentials. We want to know, essentially, how many good movies DiCaprio has made and how they stack up against the pre-Oscar résumés of those who have been honored with a top acting prize. We can do this by simply counting up films with high ratings on Rotten Tomatoes"


So the question is whether or not DiCaprio has been the Best Actor in any given year. That's obviously a subjective question. But if you wanted to try and analyze it with data, I suppose you could look at other acting awards besides the Academy Awards or maybe critics who mention best performance or something like that. Instead the author thinks that you can measure how good an actor is by how many good movies they've made. That's certainly a strange metric to base an entire article around.

By that logic, Robert Horry is the best basketball player of the last 50 years since he's won the most NBA Championships. Horry is a good player, but he's not that good. And most people would say that DeNiro is deserving of his 2 Academy Awards for acting, but he's made plenty of bad movies.

We're talking about acting, not directing. It's certainly possible to give a good performance in an otherwise not great film. Here are some of DiCaprio's movies that fell below the 75% rotten tomatoes bar:

Romeo & Juliet
Shutter Island
Revolutionary Road
Blood Diamond
The Great Gatsby
The Basketball Diaries

Meanwhile Jack Black has been in a bunch above the 75% mark including 3 Kung Fu Panda movies, School of Rock and Tropic Thunder. I love Jack Black as much as anyone, but I don't think anyone would look at those performances and say Jack Black out-acted DiCaprio because his movies had a higher rotten tomatoes rating.

What the author seems to miss is that DiCaprio is in the discussion for "best actor of his generation." When you Google that, you see DiCaprio mentioned along with Hoffman, Spacey and Washington. You click on a thread and you see DiCaprio, Bale, Norton.

If movie critics made a list of the top five current actors in Hollywood, DiCaprio would certainly be on the list, if not #1. So that's why people think he deserves an Oscar. Not because he's been a fair amount of good movies.