Bohemian Rhapsody has been winning a lot at this year’s Oscars, which is great news to the many fans its presumably acquired, being as it is the highest grossing music biopic in history — a much, much bigger hit than Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which still managed to kill the genre of cheesy music biopics for about a decade.
But not everyone’s having it. The Queen movie may be winning a ton of non-Oscar awards, including a bounty at the Golden Globes, but it has a powerfully mediocre Rotten Tomatoes score, and it’s been roundly criticized for fudging the facts, being shamelessly cornball, and for being (mostly) directed by Bryan Singer, who’s been accused by multiple people of sexual misconduct, some of them when they were underage. Some aren’t pleased.
think of how far Bohemian Rhapsody came from its earliest production sketches pic.twitter.com/yy7lFaUh2M
— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) February 25, 2019
The best sound editing in BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY is when they pause the terrible dialogue in order to crank another awesome Queen song.
— Steven Hyden (@Steven_Hyden) February 25, 2019
One of the other main carps is that it was poorly edited. Shortly after the Oscar nominations were announced in late January, one person on Twitter went viral after highlighting this clip while mentioning it as a nominee for Best Film Editing.
https://twitter.com/pramitheus/status/1089188260071514112
Cut to a month later, and editor John Ottman won the Oscar for Best Film Editing on Bohemian Rhapsody. Well, now people really aren’t having it.
https://twitter.com/Lexialex/status/1099860045175545856
Submitted: Non-sound people should not vote for the sound winners, and non-editors should not vote for the editing winner.
— Mark Harris (@MarkHarrisNYC) February 25, 2019
Did this scene clinch BEST FILM EDITING for 'Bohemian Rhapsody' at the #Oscars tonight? It's hard to say. pic.twitter.com/pjXgbpvXsQ
— Lights, Camera, Barstool (@LightsCameraPod) February 25, 2019
Can a professional motion picture editor explain BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY’s Oscar win? I genuinely don’t understand it except as some kind of collective reward for editors who’ve had to clean up a shit sandwich.
— MZS (@mattzollerseitz) February 25, 2019
https://twitter.com/thorstrilogy/status/1099857712555458560
https://twitter.com/quillivys/status/1099857869267238913
https://twitter.com/jake_p_cole/status/1099858678000295936
*Best Editing goes to…*
Bohemi… pic.twitter.com/3HU1F3SxK1— Amir Soltani (@amiresque) February 25, 2019
https://twitter.com/scottEweinberg/status/1099856949884145664
https://twitter.com/spidermanffh/status/1099856659848015873
https://twitter.com/kyloslo/status/1099862584944148480
Some were furious about its win in other categories, namely Sound Mixing and Sound Editing.
Bohemian Rhapsody literally just got an Academy Award for sound editing for putting Queen songs in a Queen movie
— Chase Mitchell (@ChaseMit) February 25, 2019
The BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY sounde editing team's hardest task was editing out the door slam, run-away foosteps, and car-engine starting sound of Singer fleeing the set
— Alan Scherstuhl (@studiesincrap) February 25, 2019
Okay, this speech about menstruation makes up for maybe one of the BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY sound wins #Oscars
— Alison Willmore / alisonwillmore.bsky.social (@alisonwillmore) February 25, 2019
Some made jokes about the real Bohemian Rhapsody-involved editing: the lack of mentions of Bryan Singer.
https://twitter.com/davidehrlich/status/1099856904954806272
The entire Bohemian Rhapsody team has done a great job editing Bryan Singer out of any acceptance speeches of the film during awards season!
— C.J. Prince (@cj_prin) February 25, 2019
Some are just burned out on all the Bohemian Rhapsody winning.
*anytime bohemian rhapsody wins* pic.twitter.com/fhsvneLvcT
— David Mack (@davidmackau) February 25, 2019
https://twitter.com/aherman2006/status/1099858849215856640
Or maybe Bohemian Rhapsody is making people dislike “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Just saying: “Bohemian Rhapsody” was the song that Scientology’s David Miscavige played in the “hole” during the church’s malevolent game of “musical chairs.”
— Alex Gibney (@alexgibneyfilm) February 25, 2019
Maybe even Freddie Mercury wouldn’t be giving Bohemian Rhapsody this many awards.
the thing is, Freddie Mercury would have liked The Favorite so much better than Bohemian Rhapsody
— Lindsay Zoladz (@lindsayzoladz) February 25, 2019
All this being said, people can always focus on all the awards not being won by Bohemian Rhapsody.
https://twitter.com/kateyrich/status/1099863888500310019
UPDATE: Rami Malek won the Oscar for Best Actor, which is something we already knew people were not going to be happy about.
