10 Years of Muriel Memories: 2012-2013

As special as we’d all like to think the Muriel Awards are, it’s not like we got into the annual online movie poll game first. There are plenty of other web-based movie awards given every year, and perhaps none are more venerable than the one founded by Mike D’Angelo way back in 1995, the Skandies. Ever since we started, we’ve done our best to co-exist comfortably with the Skandies, and they’ve been gracious enough to let us to our thing as well. One of our earlier voters jumped ship to the Skandies at one point, but I’m cool with that because he was a longtime friend of D’Angelo’s, and I expected that it was only a matter of time before they brought him aboard.

However, there was one year in which we decided to combine our voting bases and create what I dubbed at the time a “giant film-nerd all out attack!!!!” That was, of course, the Skuriels, a one-off poll that was meant to be unveiled around the same time as the results once-per-decade Sight and Sound poll recognizing the greatest films of all time. I wasn’t sure how many Skandies voters would take us seriously, but I was pleased and somewhat surprised to see that both the Skandies and the Muriels had a strong turnout to make our own lists of the best movies ever, topped (to the surprise of very few people) by Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of course, our winner was different than Sight and Sound’s choice of Vertigo, but I halfway expect the 2022 S&S poll to change its winner again, perhaps even confirming our good taste in honoring Kubrick’s masterpiece.

But although the Skuriels were our only direct association with the Skandies in 2012, that year also saw another, rather more uncomfortable coincidence involving the two awards bodies. For those of you who follow the Skandies, you’ll know that they unveil their awards differently than we do- whereas we recognize one category at a time, they unveil all of their categories at the same time, counting down from their 20th-ranked choices and progressing, one ranking per day, to #1. Roughly halfway through the Muriels that year, I received an e-mail from Steve, telling me that their top-ranked films matched ours perfectly. Best film, director, all four acting categories, screenplay, and cinematic moment/scene – all exactly the same.

At the time, I was almost sickened by the news. After all, Steve and I always worked hard to make the Muriels its own thing, and now here we looked like a bunch of copycatting Johnny-come-latelys. Yet as time passed, I became OK with it. Maybe it was one of those cosmic singularities, or something in the air at the time. Maybe it was that both voting bodies had equally good taste. Or maybe it’s just that the greatness of 2012’s finest cinematic achievements- the awesomeness of Holy Motors, Rachel Weisz’s sublime work in The Deep Blue Sea, or the prescience that this would turn out to be our last, best chance to honor the gifted Philip Seymour Hoffman. Whatever it was, it happened, and that’s just kind of the chance you take with these things. Not that I’d want it to happen again, of course…

Oh, and hey Skandies buds – what are you doing in 2022?

Coming tomorrow: the Muriels continue looking to the past with the first year of the Muriels Hall of Fame.