So we’d finished up our first year of the Muriels, and by all accounts it was a success. So maybe this little brainchild had some legs. Now it was time to think long-term – how to make the Muriels last? Naturally, the first step was to expand out voting body. As happens every year, there was some attrition, which seems particularly inevitable since we were an unknown quantity that inaugural year and some people got on board to discover it wasn’t for them. Nonetheless, Steve and I started seeking out some more viable candidates. It helped that, earlier in ’07, I took a writing gig with the sadly now defunct Screengrab, and I took the opportunity to enlist a few of my fellow Screengrabbers. Beyond that, we began branching out into the blogosphere and rolling the dice on some talented writers who hadn’t been in our sights previously. One of these new voters, Hedwig van Driel, allowed us to make inroads into Europe. For years I referred to her as our first non-American voter, which as it turns out was inaccurate – first-year voter Matt Riviera was a French expatriate living and working in Australia.
Now that we grew the voting base, I decided it was time to make ourselves a little spiffier and more presentable for the small but devoted cabal of Muriel-watchers. I contacted our multi-talented voter Martin McClellan to design a banner for the Muriels web site, one which still adorns our homepage today. But not all snazzy graphics were commissioned by me. Shortly after we invited him to be a voter, Craig Kennedy took it upon himself to put his Photoshop skills to good use by spoofing existing one-sheets in order to pay witty tribute to Muriel (I’ve posted my favorite above).
We also received some welcome attention from media both old and new. Steve and I both made our first (and thusfar only) trip to Toronto for the festival, where we met a number of other super-cool critics and bloggers. One of them, the inimitable Victor J. Morton, enfolded us into his circle of movie nerds, and later on during the awards he featured a section of the aforementioned Ms. Van Driel’s piece on Cate Blanchett in I’m Not There in his regular "Culture Briefs" column in The Washington Times. We certainly didn’t expect that, nor did we expect a post from Jim Emerson, who at the time was serving as webmaster of Roger Ebert’s site. I hadn’t received any warning that this might happen- one day, I simply decided to read Roger’s latest reviews, only to see Muriel staring back at me from the home page. Best. Surprise. Ever. We returned the favor to Jim by inviting him to join our ranks the follow year.
As for the awards themselves, it quickly became apparent that expanding the voting body was well worth the effort, since by featuring a more broad-minded group of cinema lovers we became more idiosyncratic in our tastes (not to mention our awards presentations – let’s not forget Jenny Sekwa’s tribute to Javier Bardem set to “Strangers in the Night”). Nowhere was this more apparent than in our awarding of the Best Lead Performance – Female not to an Oscar favorite as we had the year before (sorry, Helen Mirren) but to Dutch actress Carice van Houten for her breakout role in Paul Verhoeven’s post-WWII saga BLACK BOOK.
It was also our awarding of van Houten’s performance that led to our first bit of controversy and outcry, not so much for the performance itself as for a fairly racy photo I posted on my blog in conjunction with the award announcement. A number of people who were following the awards accused me of using a provocative image to drum up attention for the Muriels. In addition, they felt that by focusing on Ms. van Houten’s (obvious) sex appeal, we diminished the skill of the performance as a whole by portraying the film as gussied-up exploitation. Of course, this was never my intent – I was mostly trying to post an image from the movie that I hadn’t seen hundreds of times already – and besides, if you know Verhoeven’s work , you’ll recognize that there’s always more than a whiff of exploitation to pretty much everything he does. Nonetheless, I ended up replacing the image with something less polarizing in order to smooth things over. Sure, it could be seen as lily-livered on my part, but the Muriels weren’t just my creation anymore, and I wanted to make sure they weren’t derailed by something as relatively insignificant as a photograph.
Finally, holy crap 2007 was a great year for movies. No Country For Old Men was a great Best Picture winner for us, but I actually prefer our #2 and #3 finishers, There Will Be Blood and Zodiac. Oh, and when Ben Affleck’s Argo won back at the Oscars in 2012, I made sure to point out to anyone who would listen that the Muriels anticipated his emergence as a filmmaker of note five years previously.
Coming tomorrow: Muriel discovers social media, leading to massive growth of our voting body, as well as our first dark horse Best Film winner.
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