15 Most Overrated Movies Of The Decade (So Far)
4. Selma
People need to stop blaming the Academy for not giving more notice to Selma. It was, after all, Paramount that failed the Martin Luther King film in that regard; they didn't even think to push the film for Oscars until awards season was already well under way. Although the real reason may be something simpler and unpolitical; Selma was, removing all the charged context, not that special a movie.
Sure, Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game) shouldn't have been sat alongside Richard Linklater (Boyhood) and Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman) for Best Director at the 2015 Oscars, but surely it should have been Dan Gilroy (Nightcrawler), David Fincher (Gone Girl) or Damien Chazelle (Whiplash) who filled that extra space, not Ava DuVernay? If she'd been a white man and turned in the same film there'd have been none of this talk.
And that's the central reason the film's become so overrated. There's a lot to be said about racial and gender issues within Hollywood and it's something the whole industry, and not just one awards-giving group, needs to address. But let's not have an increasing perception of this problem lead to typically average films being trumpeted as some great, important work. Selma is a not-that-remarkable biopic with a great central performance (and it's perfectly fine like that).