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Wednesday, December 18, 2013

A Quick Note on the Poll

I've changed the focus of this blog toward mainly Oscar nominees. As you can see on the right, I've created categories for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Actress, and Best Original Screenplay.

I've been considering adding a few other categories as well, but I can't decide which to use, hence the poll at the top right. Here are the four (kinda five) new potential categories, as well as the pros and cons of each.

Best Foreign Language Feature: adds 225 films to the list
Pros: Continues to expose me to the best non-English films the world has to offer.
Cons: Adds 225 films, many of which are difficult (if not impossible) to locate.

Best Supporting Actor/Actress: adds 197 films to the list
Pros: A natural addition to Best Actor/Actress.
Cons: Adds a lot of films, many of which may have little to offer save the one performance.

Best Adapted Screenplay: adds 77 films to the list
Pros: Covers the entirety of Oscar history and fits in naturally with Original Screenplay.
Cons: It's difficult to tell the quality of the adaptation if I'm not familiar with the original source material.

Best Animated Feature: adds 38 films to the list
Pros: Beefs up a sadly neglected area of film on this blog, and doesn't swamp me with new, hard-to-find films. Cons: Feels like a lightweight category compared with the others.

So, please take a moment, consider, and vote. Thanks!

6 comments:

  1. Great idea! Should the poll say Best Adapted Screenplay?

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    1. Yes. Yes it should, but it won't let me edit it. Ah, well.

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  2. For what it's worth: in addition to the Original and Adapted Screenplay categories there was a Best Writing category for a couple of decades. It even co-existed with the other two for a while. I think it started in the 30s and went to the 50s.

    I voted for Screeplay since I personally like a good story more than anything else. I would never have discovered Margin Call, for instance, if its screenplay had not been nominated.

    And I'd do Animated anyway because it's small to begin with and there are some fun movies in it. Yes, some will be lightweight films, but would that be that bad? You'd also have an excuse to rewatch most of the Pixar films.

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    1. It's not so much that the films are lightweight, but that the category feels lightweight because it's only existed for a dozen years. Like...I could watch all of them in five weeks if I didn't watch any other films.

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    2. As a Project Manager it was actually a good thing to have smaller, intermediate goals for my people. It gives a psychological boost of making progress and accomplishing goals. If you think about it, your posts about seeing all of the first 100, 200, etc on the 1,001 Movies list were those kinds of goals. Knocking off the animated category could be like that.

      This is also the same reason why I knocked off a handful of smaller lists (Sight and Sound Critics 250, Directors 100, and a couple of other Top 100 lists) before finding myself working on the larger TSPDT list, among others.

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    3. True. Even at one a week, and figuring in the nominees for the coming year, I'd be done by the end of the year with that category.

      It's likely that, eventually, all of those categories will be added here. Just not all at once--it's too overwhelming.

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