Golden Year Award 2019

This year, for the first time ever, the Golden Tomato Awards honors the people who created and worked on some of the year’s best movies and TV shows, and for our inaugural Golden Year Award, we gave it over to you, the fans, to tell us who in the movie and TV industry had the best year. Basically: Who absolutely owned 2019? We narrowed the choices down to some 15 contenders based on their achievements over 2019, from big awards to zeitgeist-capturing moments to hugely successful projects – and in most cases, multiple hugely successful projects. After casting more than 34,000 votes, Rotten Tomatoes fans crowned a winner: Keanu Freaking Reeves. And it’s hard to argue with that pick: Reeves starred in three Certified Fresh movies this year – John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabelum, Always Be My Maybe, and Toy Story 4 – and news came thick and fast of reboots of some of his biggest films, including Bill and Ted Face the Music, and The Matrix 4, which will be released on the same day as John Wick: Chapter 4 in 2021. Oh, and he gave us the best movie entrance of the century, so far.

Runners up for the Golden Year Award were, in order: Adam Driver, who delivered powerhouse performances in movies ranging from Marriage Story to The Rise of Skywalker; Robert Pattinson, whose killer year on the screen (The Lighthouse, High Life) was paired with the announcement he will play the caped crusader in The Batman; Scarlett Johansson, who mixed the dramatic with the blockbuster, starring in Endgame, Jojo Rabbit, and Marriage Story; and Bong Joon-ho, who won the Palme d’Or and then four Academy Awards for his Korean phenomenon Parasite.

The order below reflects the number of total votes cast for each film by users in a poll that ran on RT from January 9 to February 16.

Adam Driver
Driver showed why he’s one of the most in-demand stars of the day, pulling off an emotional turnaround in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywaker as well as awards-worthy work in The Report and Marriage Story. He somehow made time to fight zombies, too, in The Dead Don’t Die.

Robert Pattinson
Pattinson continued his indie streak, first in Claire Denis’s mind-bending space thriller, High Life, and then in Robert Eggers’ rain-soaked two-hander, The Lighthouse. His hilarious turn as the dauphin in The King was only upstaged by the announcement he would be the next Batman.

Scarlett Johansson
If it wasn’t enough that Johansson earned two Oscar nominations this year – Best Supporting Actress for Jojo Rabbit and Best Actress for Marriage Story – she also played a pivotal role in the biggest movie of the year, and all time, Avengers: Endgame.

Bong Joon Ho
Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho pulled off what no one before him ever had: winning the Oscar for Best Picture with a foreign-language movie. That film, Parasite, made more than $200 million worldwide, win four Oscars total (along with the Palme d’Or), and made Bong a household name in the U.S.