Award Season: Rotten Tomatoes Honors Some Unexpected Favorites

Hollywood's major award celebrations get rolling on Sunday, when the Hollywood Foreign Press Association puts on its annual Golden Globe Awards show, and award excitement will reach its peak at the end of February, when the Academy Awards are handed out. But in the meantime, just about every association and organization that has anything to do with film or television will be doling out awards, including the review aggregating web site, Rotten Tomatoes, which announced its annual Golden Tomato Award winners this week.

The awards were determined by ranking films and TV series according to their "Fresh" ratings, a number determined by the proportion of positive critics' reviews the project received. The result is a list of films and series that will, no doubt, differ dramatically from the winners at the Oscars. At the top of the film list is Mad Max: Fury Road, followed by Pixar's Inside Out and Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens.

On the TV side of things, the top series are even more surprising, given that two of the top three shows are not even on traditional television. The freshest series is the Breaking Bad spin-off Better Call Saul, which airs on AMC, but second place goes to Master of None, Aziz Ansari's Netflix sitcom. The third-place series is even more unusual. It's Catastrophe, a British TV export that in the United States is available only on Amazon Prime Instant Video.