*A data information website compared the historical accuracy of recent Oscar contenders – and Ava DuVernay’s 2014 Martin Luther King film “Selma” has been declared the most accurate of them all.
The website Information Is Beautiful published a scene-by-scene breakdown of 14 Hollywood films, giving each one a percentage on their “Based on a True Story” claim.
“Selma” has been declared 100% accurate, meaning the filmmaker did not take any liberties to portray historical events in the motion picture.
“This movie painstakingly recreates events as they happened,” the website wrote of DuVernay’s drama. “(It) takes care to include everybody who was involved. Which explains the larger-than-usual-for-Hollywood cast.”
Ava acknowledged the distinction on Twitter Monday:
Seven blessings to all the presidential librarians and their hit squads. Much love ✌?️ https://t.co/elVyoH2Yp3
— Ava DuVernay (@AVAETC) November 28, 2016
The drama “12 Years A Slave,” about free black man Solomon Northup who was kidnapped from upstate New York and sold into slavery in the South, was deemed 88.1% based on a true story, the website reported. “We found very little data to crosscheck Solomon’s account with, but we think his memoir is most likely reliable,” the website stated of John Ridley’s Oscar-winning screenplay. “They crammed almost everything from that book into this movie. While there was a touch of dramatic license here & there, the most gut-wrenching scenes really happened.
Also ranking high on the list was last year’s Best Picture winner “Spotlight” taking 81.6% and financial crisis drama “The Big Short” at 91.4%.
The worst ranked film on the list was Oscar-winning World War II drama “The Imitation Game,” the true story of mathematician Alan Turing’s effort to crack the enigma code.
“Alan Turing did work as a cryptographer at Bletchley Park during the war and was arrested for homosexuality after the war. That much is true,” the website wrote.
“Most of the rest of this film isn’t. To be fair, shoe-horning the incredible complexity of the Enigma machine and cyptography in general was never going to be easy. But this film just rips the historical record to shreds.”
The film went on to win Best Screenplay for Graham Moore, but only 41.4% of its scenes were deemed real.
“American Sniper,” Clint Eastwood’s film about Navy Seal Chris Kyle, got the second lowest grade of 56.9%.
“The Social Network” was 76.1% true and “The King’s Speech” was 73.4% historically accurate.
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