Never afraid to put the chart before the horse race, Ziyad Abul Hawa enables our list addiction with the first of this year’s Chart of Charts, combining several standard movie-rating yardsticks into one stunning at-a-glance table of greatness. Ziyad is all-inclusive with his big tent approach, gathering data for documentaries, animated features and foreign language films as well as allowing movies from last year whose Oscar window has already closed. At the end of the chart extension after the cut, I’ve taken the liberty of sifting through the list and lifting out only those titles that stand a more likely chance for Best Picture recognition.
Nothing can beat Ziyad’s chart for its massive amount of data compiled for handy reference. (Here’s a bigger version you can use to cover your refrigerator door.)
What I’ll do for a followup addendum is more modest in scope.
With the help of ladylurks’ BFCA list we’ll look at the top films reviewed by that group, with respect to their consistent parallels to Oscar taste. Next to that we’ll lay the results of last month’s Awards Daily readers poll, to see which upcoming movies might be infiltrating the top tier already established. (The titles tinted blue are already in theaters; those not yet seen in are woven into the chart appropriately tinted as “grey area”).
Finally in the third column we’re compare the expert guesswork of the Gurus of Gold first swing at official prediction. Many of these movies are showing up on the charts sight unseen, and you can already witness several pieces of wishful thinking falling off or otherwise failing to fit in.
But a pattern is certainly beginning to emerge, isn’t it? It’s nice to have fewer movies that are totally unknown quantities this year than we did the same point in 2009. And note another curious development. The top 13 films listed by the Gurus of Gold and those voted by Awards Daily readers are virtually the same 13 titles. Two identical hands, just shuffled around in the deck a little differently, as if one group is playing poker while the other is building runs for gin rummy. But across all these charts we can see a full house being gradually assembled.
(What? Can’t read microfiche with the naked eye? Here’s an enlarged view.)
