In 2010, I decided to finally tackle another social media frontier – Facebook. Of course, I had other more personal reasons for trying it out – my wife already had an account, and I thought it would be a good way to keep in touch with people I didn’t see on a regular basis. But it also worked as a good platform to network with the majority of the voters (there are still a few holdouts – ahem, STEVE), particularly when I wanted to say something that didn’t necessarily justify an e-mail but also required more than the 140 characters to which one was limited on Twitter. For a few years, it was just me making Muriel-related pronouncements on Facebook as myself, but a few years later I decided to start up the Muriel Awards Facebook page (where many of you are reading this).
At the same time, Steve was hard at work establishing the Muriels blog, christened “Our Science Is Too Tight” (it’s a Mr. Show reference, for those who didn’t know). In our first three years, I posted awards announcements and other news on my blog, and when he took over in 2009, Steve did likewise. But he reckoned that if we wanted to make the Muriels look legitimate, the best idea would be to have a blog devoted to the cause, instead of having Muriels business interspersed with news about upcoming Criterion Collection releases and plugs for writing I’d done lately.
He was right, of course. In fact, when we originally discussed the idea for Our Science (as we called it), there was the hope it would be a year-round resource with which voters could keep track of each other, with links to recent posts and the like. We had also posited the idea of developing more original content for the blog- I suggested some kind of canon-building feature, for example, as well as reflections on local cinema offerings from voters stationed all over the map. Alas, it wasn’t to be- none of the original features ever got off the ground, and although we did regular link posts featuring Muriels voters’ recent work, it got to be really time consuming and none of us wanted to keep up the practice.
Still, it was clear by 2010 that online networking was no longer the future – it was the way we lived now. So it was only fitting that our big 2010 winner, The Social Network, dealt with the still fairly recent origins of Facebook. David Fincher’s film was a Muriels juggernaut this year, claiming awards for Best Film, Director, Male Lead, Screenplay, Ensemble, Music, and our newest category, Best Editing.
But although one film thoroughly dominated many Muriels categories that year, the year’s other notable offerings represented a fairly diverse and eccentric batch. Just two spots below Social Network in the Best Film category was our highest-placing foreign language film to date, Yorgos Lanthimos’ oddball masterpiece Dogtooth. Alongside Muriel perennials like the Coen brothers and Pixar, there were also strong showings by Carlos, Exit Through the Gift Shop, and Mother, not to mention a third-place finish in the Best Body of Work category for Portuguese filmmaker Manoel de Oliveira, who directed two noteworthy 2010 releases even though he was already 102 years old at the time of the awards.
Coming tomorrow: the last of the big across-the-board Muriels sweeps… so far.
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