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.