Megyn Kelly asks why a movie with a 18% on RT wasn’t nominated for Best Picture
Leave it up to someone like Megyn Kelly to rally behind a bad movie and blame DEI initiatives for why it wasn’t nominated for Oscars. It is just a bad movie!
The film Reagan was released in 2024. Telling the story of Ronald Reagan’s rise to the presidency, the film has been toted as a kind portrait of the President who, arguably, destroyed our economy. I remember learning about “Reaganomics” in school. Dennis Quaid played Reagan and the film itself came out without a lot of noise but those fans of the actor turned president seem to have found the film and enjoy it.
For people like Kelly, they’re mad that the film wasn’t allowed to considered for the Academy Awards because it did not meet the Academy’s criteria. That criteria being that you have to do the bare minimum in terms of inclusion for the film to be considered for Best Picture. It didn’t stop the film from being considered in other categories (and it was not nominated in any of them).
Kelly joined a chorus of outrage (of seemingly just her and the film’s screenwriter) complaining about it’s lack of eligibility for Best Picture consideration. Why? Because the Academy implemented rules encourage a more inclusive strategy to making films. Basically, the Academy said “you can’t make a film with just a bunch of straight guys” after the Oscars So White controversy.
Kelly is pushing the narrative that this is the reason that the film didn’t get award season love. Not, you know, the extremely poor reception the movie had with critics. Currently, it has an 18% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. On the flip of that, the audience score is 98% with 5,000+ verified reviews. Many of which are pro-Ronald Reagan reviews.
It wasn’t “not” nominated because it was DEI. It wasn’t nominated cause it’s a bad movie
Kelly was alerted to the issue when the film’s screenwriter, Howard A. Klausner spoke The New York Post about the film and shared that Reagan was “eliminated for consideration” from the Academy Awards. The policy states that any film that wants to be considered for Best Picture has to meet a minimum of two of their inclusion policies. Two.
“We were among 116 films that were eliminated for consideration this year,” Klausner told the outlet. “Obviously, there needs to be a conversation about this policy.” Klausner’s quote has fueled the anti-DEI fire that MAGA pundits like Kelly. Who technically, according to the Academy’s rule, would be one of those DEI requirements.
“The biggest outrage of the whole [Oscars]: Where was Reagan? Reagan was not nominated for Best Picture… [because] they didn’t qualify under the weird DEI standards that Hollywood has,” Kelly said about the “snub” the film got, in her opinion. “You are not eligible to win that award unless you have quotas met on your cast. It’s ridiculous. They got robbed – that is my own opinion.”
Kelly…there was never a world where this movie was going to get nominated for Best Picture, inclusion policies or not. So many movies were infinitely better than this film and yet they didn’t make the 10 movie cut so why would you think this movie that critics rightfully panned would?
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