Is James Cameron Really the Best Director?

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

With the Golden Globes behind us, let’s have a look at whether viewers agreed with the judges’ choices. We gathered over 200 000 tweets from people chatting about the Golden Globes Awards and categorized them into tweets that were positive, neutral, or negative.  We then selected all the tweets that were related to the Best Director of a Motion Picture category and analyzed the results. The chart below illustrates the percentage of tweets that were classified as positive, in other words, they showed a high degree of satisfaction or approval.

First of all, it is clear that even though James Cameron, the Director of Avatar, won in the category of Best Director, he wasn’t necessarily the winner in the viewers’ eyes. In fact, Reitman, the Director of Up in the Air, generated the most positive tweets with 45% of them being positive compared to 42% for Cameron. And, compared to Reitman generating 11% negative tweets, 14% of Cameron’s tweets were negative. It was a pretty close race for viewers, but Reitman came out just slightly ahead with 3% more positive tweets and 3% fewer negative tweets. And just behind Reitman and Cameron is Bigelow, the director of Hurt Locker. It appears that this still wasn’t the year to showcase the first female winner of this award.

At the other end of the spectrum was Tarantino who directed Inglourious Basterds. Tarantino only managed to generate 26% positive tweets. Further, 23% of tweets about him were negative. Some people just needed to display their displeasure at this loss. And finally, our sympathies go to Clint Eastwood, the Director of Invictus, who didn’t  make it to our podium because so few people tweeted about him.

The Screen Actors Guild awards are coming up next. Grab some popcorn and let’s see what happens!