Tallied up the numbers late last night as soon as we hit 2300 votes. Interesting how consistent you guys have been all year in your sustained enthusiasm for the top dozen titles. The 5 films at the pinnacle of this chart emerged within the first hour of voting, and barely varied in position as other titles found traction and shuffled in the rankings. The relative percentages for the top 3 titles held true all weekend long.
[Curious footnote, and maybe a significant reflection on the nature of polls in general: Wednesday when the poll was first posted, Appaloosa languished near the bottom with very few votes. After a few new Appaloosa stills became available and we featured them on Friday, the movie began to climb. No hype required. Just the enthusiasm and interest generated spontaneously by you guys in the comments was all it took to raise awareness and lift the status of a film that had been previously overlooked. Something to keep in mind when cabal news pundits base endless arguments on transitory political polls over the next few weeks.]
Full list of titles and vote percentages, along with a few more musings after the cut.
As for these tentative Oscar contender results, my gut feeling is that these top half dozen are almost too good to be true. If those titles still reign undiminished at the end of the year, it’ll be the first time I’ve been excited by all 5 Best Picture nominees since forever. One or two of them seems destined to be nudged out by whatever more middlebrow “safe” and traditional movies comes along.
The other major factors to consider are the films I failed to list in the poll. What international knockout will be this year’s La Vie en Rose or Le Scaphandre et le papillon? What adorable Indie will surface as the season’s Juno or Little Miss Sunshine? I know some of our readers have probably already seen these more elusive movies, or have a good inkling what they might be. Soon we’ll need to broaden our focus to start examining the many promising possibilities outside the box.
The Dark Knight, Revolutionary Road, Australia and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button look really solid right now, with Doubt, Milk,, Changeling, WALL¬∑E and Frost/Nixon playing musical chairs for the remaining openings. If those manage to hold on to the top spots, not only does it mean you guys are geniuses for seeing them as far back as February — it would also be the dictionary definition of “predictable.” So I think it’s almost more fun to think about where we’ve gone wrong.
You can still vote if you missed the poll, but the screen grabs of the poll results are a snapshot of where things stood at 10 p.m. Sunday night.