One of the most welcome developments to arise for the Muriels in the 2009-2010 year was that we were finally able to get some help from distributors, who for the first time sent out screeners for our voters to watch. While many of our voters are honest-to-goodness critical types (both old- and new-media), a number of us- include me- are not, which can make it difficult for us who have to make time to watch acclaimed titles, particularly those with a limited release, in time for the voting deadline. Therefore, you can imagine how helpful it was that we were able to watch more of the year’s notable titles in the comfort of our homes prior to filling out our ballots.
Because of this change, our selections began to have more of an arthouse bent to them. For example, Claire Denis’ lovely limited release 35 Shots of Rum was able to crack our top 10, which to some extent can be attributed to Cinema Guild providing us some screener DVDs. But while Magnolia gave us some help as well, we can’t credit them for the landslide Best Lead Actress victory by Tilda Swinton in their 2009 release Julia – of the two dozen screeners they sent me, Julia wasn’t one of them, and when I informed them of her victory, their representative seemed genuinely surprised that we showed so much love for a film that was largely overlooked, even by its distributor.
The representative for Magnolia wasn’t the only industry professional we informed of their relevant Muriels win. On Twitter, one of our voters took the opportunity to tell Michael McKean, star of our 25th Anniversary Award winner This Is Spinal Tap, and he seemed amused by the news. Even more amusing (to me anyway) was the prospect of sending an e-mail to Zentropa Entertainment, the production company responsible for making Antichrist, who claimed a surprise victory for Best Cinematography. I didn’t expect any response to this information, but I actually received a pleasant e-mail response from Lars von Trier’s assistant, who expressed genuine pleasure at the award and assured me that she would pass the news on to her boss. I have no idea how he might have reacted, but I like to think he’d at least be pleased that not ALL Americans have terrible taste in movies.
Our choice for Best Film of 2009 was Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, by a surprisingly small margin of victory. What’s more, the film actually received fewer votes in the category than the runner-up, The Hurt Locker. But an even closer race was in the 10th Anniversary Award category, in which our top two choices, Eyes Wide Shut and Magnolia , actually received the same number of points, with the winner (Kubrick) being determined by the number of votes. The tightness of these races- and several others for that matter- would suggest a highly diverse crop of winners, but in fact the opposite was true, with Basterds winning more Muriels that year than any other film today- Best Film, Director, Supporting Actor, Screenplay, and Ensemble Performance. This was the first time we’d awarded the same film in both Best Film and Best Director, while also kicking off several years in which we suddenly became prone to sweep victories. Thankfully, this has become less common in the last few years, although whether the trend has returned this year has yet to be discovered.
One final thing that sticks out in my mind about the ’09 Muriels is that how, more than any year before or sense, these awards really threw our ongoing “women problem” in sharp relief. Granted, we were always aware that we had a disproportionately low number of women in our ranks, but although we were able to enlist a handful of women in previous years, there were precisely zero female voters participating in the 2009-2010 Muriels (the previous years’ female voters declined to return for various reasons). This didn’t escape the attention of voters and other Muriel-watchers either, and the fact that we placed two female-directed films in our top 10 did nothing to alleviate the criticism. Since that rather eye-opening moment we’ve made a greater effort to bring more female movie nerds on board, with some (limited amounts) of success. But even if you think we still don’t have enough female voters, rest assured – I think the same. And I’m still working to change that.
Coming tomorrow: The Muriels join the Facebook age… in more ways than one.
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