Entertainment magazine Variety asked its movie critics to name the worst and most overrated films of 2015.

The only female critic to provide for the list, Ella Taylor, listed "The Hunting Ground" as a film that received " empty prestige."

"Speaking of shoddy journalism," Taylor wrote after naming "Truth," the film that attempted to vindicate Dan Rather, the worst film of the year, "the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has succumbed without a murmur to 'The Hunting Ground,' placing on its documentary feature shortlist a loaded piece of agitprop that plays fast and loose with statistics and our sympathy with victims of campus sexual assault."

"With death-defying leaps of logic on the basis of skimpy and distorted evidence, Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering's film does violence to both the legitimate fight for women's rights and the honorable cause of advocacy filmmaking," Taylor wrote.

The Washington Examiner has previously detailed — rather extensively — the problems with "The Hunting Ground."

The film uses debunked statistics to claim that 1-in-5 women will be sexually assaulted while in college. The number comes from self-reported surveys, a notoriously dubious way to collect facts and a dangerous way to create public policy. The film also relies on another shoddy "study" and the "expertise" of researcher David Lisak, who claimed that most rapes on campus were perpetrated by a small number of repeat offenders.

Lisak used the research of his students to create his own study, which didn't even focus on college campuses but has somehow been used to illustrate an alleged rape "epidemic" in higher education.

Beyond the statistics, "The Hunting Ground" failed to do basic journalism by not fact-checking the accusations it presented in the film. It ignored the credibility problems and false statements made by the accusers in the film in an attempt to malign the accused. The film didn't even attempt to contact the accused students or anyone who could speak for them in order to get the other side of the story until after the film was sent for Sundance consideration.

In an email to the attorney of one of the accusers, Amy Herdy, an interviewer for the film, acknowledged that the filmmakers were not acting as journalists but as advocates.

This "shoddy journalism," as Variety's Emma Taylor called it, received scorn from the president of Florida State University (my alma mater), John Thrasher, and 19 Harvard Law professors. The two schools were featured in the film for not finding accused students responsible.

Because that's what this is really all about – not the truth but about finding male students responsible based solely on an accusation. Even if that accusation doesn't hold up.

The filmmakers even worked to edit Wikipedia pages to conform to the film's narrative, and promoted the film on other pages dealing with rape.

The filmmaker's response to criticism has been, essentially: "Nuh uh, anyone who disagrees with us is pro-rape."

Back in October, Variety predicted "The Hunting Ground" would get on the shortlist for an Oscar nomination — and they were right. Though I don't have high expectations, I hope the Oscars will see through this work of propaganda and take a pass. At least one film critic saw the film for what it is.