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Friday, January 3, 2014

New Features!

With a new year come new projects. In terms of this blog, that means a couple of new regular features—one monthly, the other weekly (I hope).

The monthly feature is one I’m looking forward to quite a bit. Nick over at Your Face and I used to podcast together, at least until he moved to Korea for a year. Nick is also the first person I know of to create a watch list based on films selected by other people. We chose films for each other all the time, but Nick has been incredibly dedicated to filling gaps in his film knowledge based on the selections of others. In the past couple of years, I’ve selected 14 films for Nick to watch beyond the podcast. So it’s time for him to return the favor. He’s picked a dozen for me, one per month. On the third Monday of every month, I will post a review of one of Nick’s picks.

Second is something I’ve been slowly working up to. Since the focus of this blog has moved from the 1001 Movies list to Oscar films, it’s time to start considering those Oscar awards. So every Friday (starting next week), I will break down all of the nominees of a given category in a given year and determine who I think should have won. I will not break down a year/category until I have legitimately seen every nominated film, or every one I can in cases where a film is no longer available.

I had genuinely hoped to produce a list of the Best Picture winners in ranked order for today, but that fell through when I got a broken disc from NetFlix. Oh, well. Instead, I’ll show you what the various tags will look like for this.

When the Academy hands out the award the same way I would have, it gets a pat on the back and happy smiles all around.

There will be times when the Academy and I will disagree, but I can’t really fault what won. My own choice might be different, but the winner is still deserving. That’s when you’ll see this one.

There may be rare instances when I think that Oscar went the right way, but I can’t be sure because films are missing and no copies exist. Should that happen, the following picture will appear.

Naturally, there will be plenty of times when the right performance or movie was nominated, but the award went another way. Expect to see the following picture quite often.

And then there will be the times when the right picture or performance wasn’t even nominated. When this happens, I will not hold back.

Here’s to hoping that this feature turns out to be as interesting and as much fun as I’m hoping it will be. We’ll find out in a week.

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7 comments:

  1. Chip LaryJanuary 3, 2014 at 8:14 PM

    With only five noms in most categories I can see how the last image will be the one most often showing up. I look forward to both of your new features. How long did it take Nick to find a dozen movies you hadn't already seen that he felt were worth watching and reviewing?

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    1. NickJanuary 3, 2014 at 9:18 PM

      About 10-15 minutes. :P

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    2. SJHoneywellJanuary 3, 2014 at 10:05 PM

      Yeah, about that. He only picked one that I'd seen, so he had to choose a 13th, but he had that right away.

      Also, and I'm not sure if this was by design or by luck, all 12 of Nick's selections are movies that do not exist on any of my Oscar lists.

      As for that final image, I'll only use it when it's really warranted. I've never been shy about pimping out North by Northwest as my favorite movie, but the fact that it wasn't nominated in 1959 doesn't really bother me, and Ben-Hur is a fine choice. I'll try to reserve that for situations when there was a really huge miss.

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  2. ChrisJanuary 4, 2014 at 2:42 AM

    I love those banners :) That's really trusting you let someone pick films for you to watch. Good luck with your new features, sounds really interesting.

    By the way, Ii you are looking to break down all of the Oscar nominees for each year, you should take a look at The Cinematic Spectacle(http://classicblanca.blogspot.com). Josh is already doing yearly ballots like that(based on US release dates).

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    1. SJHoneywellJanuary 4, 2014 at 8:12 AM

      Josh is doing something far more extensive than I'm planning. There will be times when I suggest a few additional possible nominees, but I'm not doing anything like making entire ballots like he is. That's way too much work! It's damned impressive, though, and I'm looking forward to having the chance to go through his choices. I can't imagine having seen enough films in a given year to feel like I'll ever be that thorough or authoritative on a given year, though.

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  3. marie_dresslerJanuary 4, 2014 at 10:28 AM

    Be sure to give us the name of your podcast so we can download it! Listening to podcasts is one of my favorite things.

    One of the reasons I have seen so many old movies is that I participated twice in an exercise called Fixing the Oscars on the IMDb Classic Film Board. It involved a complicated system of voting and around 30-50 people for each year. Doing the same by yourself and with the nominees only should cut out a lot of the arguments that cropped up!

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    1. SJHoneywellJanuary 4, 2014 at 10:48 AM

      The podcast was The Demented Podcast. Nick has moved on to a new one and I've stopped podcasting. I recommend We Sing Poorly (http://www.yourfaceisa.com/category/podcasts/we-sing-poorly/), which is Nick's new monthly podcast.

      I'm not going to pretend that what I'm doing will be at all definitive. It's more or less just for fun...with a healthy dose of my ego thrown in.

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