2015 Muriel Awards: Addendum #1 - More Moments We Loved

And now, just for fun, some more of Muriel’s favorite scenes of 2015:


What a lovely day (sandstorm), Mad Max: Fury Road


Final scene, Carol


Abstract thought, Inside Out


The Final Derriere, The Forbidden Room


“Diamonds,” Girlhood


“Drift Away,” Ricki & the Flash


Bugles treadmill game, Buzzard


Fantasy football, Timbuktu

Okay, just one more…


Cars can’t fly, Furious 7

2015 Muriel Awards: Best Cinematic Moment

This may be the most divisive of all the Muriel Awards. For some people, it’s a favorite, allowing them to look back at the most indelible moments of the year. For others, it’s a source of endless frustration. Honestly, I can go either way. I love to think about all the great scenes the movie year had to offer, but always have a heap of trouble trying to narrow my list to ten favorites, to the point where I don’t even rank my ballot anymore. That said, I can’t argue with any of our picks for the year’s best, and I think our winner is particularly great.

Third place:


There and back again: a border crossing tale, Sicario [168.5 points / 16 votes] (note: the above video is from the final five minutes or so of this scene)

Second place:


“How much for the Cheetos and water?”, Magic Mike XXL [186.5 points / 18 votes]

And the Muriel goes to…

2015 Muriel Awards: Best Screenplay

Well, folks – it’s Oscar Sunday, which means there’s only one week left until the announcement of this year’s Golden Muriel Award winner for Best Film. We’ll be announcing the rest of our awards throughout the week, including favorites like best cinematic moment, body of work, and documentary, before moving onto the biggies – director and male and female lead. Any predictions for what will win big this year?

On to today’s business…

Third place:

Spotlight (written by Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer) [89 points / 14 votes]

Second place:

Anomalisa (screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, based on his play [107 points / 18 votes]

And the Muriel goes to…

2015 Muriel Awards: Best Cinematography

Over the last ten years, I have thought of the Muriel Awards as a kind of corrective to the Oscars, in which the voters honor their favorite achievements of the year, removed from the echo chamber of Oscar-season hype. That said, sometimes there are occasions in which our collective taste has dovetailed with the Academy’s. This year’s cinematography is one of those occasions, with our top four finishers all being Oscar nominees as well. I don’t think that’s a case of us buying into the buzz – after all, there are plenty of more eccentric choices bubbling just under these – but a strange and wonderful instance in which the Academy actually manages to get it right. Sort of like how it would be if Don Hertzfeldt won tomorrow night, come to think of it.

Anyway…

Third place:

The Revenant (director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki) [120 points / 20 votes]

Second place:

Mad Max: Fury Road (director of photography John Seale) [195 points / 30 votes]

And the Muriel goes to…

2015 Muriel Awards: 50th Anniversary Award

Of all the Muriel Awards categories, I wouldn’t say I have a favorite, but I look forward to finding out the winner of the 50th Anniversary Award more than most of the others. A lot of that has to do with the dual nature of the award. Not only do we award our favorite film from fifty years ago as part of the Muriels, but the recipient of the award is also the first inductee into the upcoming Muriels Hall of Fame class. Who will join it? Find out later this year!

Third place:

For a Few Dollars More (dir. Sergio Leone) [126 points / 21 votes]

Second place:

Chimes at Midnight (dir. Orson Welles) [131 points / 21 votes]

And the Muriel (and Hall of Fame induction) goes to…

2015 Muriel Awards: Best Body of Work

I suppose it’s not too big a spoiler for me to say that this year’s winner in this category is a woman (to which people who make it to the end of this piece will say, “no duh,” but whatever). I mention this to highlight the fact that this category has been dominated by guys from the beginning, to the point that our first female winner wasn’t until last year. Yes – even in Jessica Chastain’s world-beating 2011, she was roundly beaten by Michael Fassbender, though she did take home Best Breakthrough. I wonder why it's been like this. Is it that the good attention-grabbing roles are easier to come by for men than they are for women, thereby allowing them to rack up multiple worthy performances in a single calendar year? It can’t simply be that men dominate nearly every non-acting field, considering an actor has won this category every year but 2009 (take a bow, Soderbergh). Or is it really just because we're mostly dudes? I just don’t know. However, I do know that the female gender has the same number of Best Body of Work wins as Matthew McConaughey. Make of that what you will.

Moving on…

Third place:

Oscar Isaac (actor - Ex Machina and Star Wars: The Force Awakens) [98 points / 16 votes]

Second place:

Alicia Vikander (actor - Ex Machina, The Danish Girl, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and Burnt) [127 points / 19 votes]

And the Muriel goes to…

2015 Muriel Awards: Best Music

As a rule, this category is pretty hard to pin down. Granted, some of that is by design – if you take a look at this category on the Muriels site, you’ll notice that its full name is “Best Music: Original, Adapted, or Compiled.” Therefore, our winners have encompassed a wide range of styles throughout the years, from assembled collections of largely pre-existing material (Inside Llewyn Davis) to full-on scores (The Dark Knight), with the two Wes Anderson films we’ve awarded here falling somewherein between. This year was definitely an original score kinda year. Plenty of worthy contenders for a voters to choose from this year, from the throwbacks and homages to cutting-edge music. Who took the prize? Drumroll, please…

Third place:

It Follows (score composed by Disasterpeace) [147 points / 23 votes]

Second place:

Carol (score composed by Carter Burwell) [159 points / 25 votes]

And the Muriel goes to…

2015 Muriel Awards: 25th Anniversary Award

Much as I expected, the 25th Anniversary Award was pretty much a blowout this year, so much so that you probably won’t have to think very hard to predict the winner (or the second-place finisher, for that matter). I was, however, pleased to see the strong showing for our #3 film – not to mention that I wasn’t the only person to vote for Akira Kurosawa’s Dreams and The Match Factory Girl.

Third place:

Close-Up (dir. Abbas Kiarostami) [102 points / 16 votes]

Second place:

Miller’s Crossing (dir. Joel Coen) [202 points / 32 votes]

And the Muriel goes to…

2015 Muriel Awards: Best Ensemble Performance

Another pretty tight race today, in a year chock full of loaded (though largely male-dominated) casts. Even though I didn’t vote for the winner, I wouldn’t argue with it either, considering how full of awesome performers it is.
Third place (tie):

The Big Short [68 points / 11 votes]…

… and Creed [68 points / 11 votes]

Second place:

Spotlight [187 points / 29 votes]

And the Muriel goes to…

2015 Muriel Awards: Best Editing

Remember when I said there were lots of close races this year? Well, this wasn’t one of them. In fact, the winner - which you can probably guess already - won by the second-largest margin of victory in Muriels history, garnering 309% as many points as its nearest competition (the all-time champ remains Christopher “It’s a BINGO!” Waltz for Inglourious Basterds, who got 357% of the points earned by that year’s #2, future Doctor #12 Peter Capaldi). But even if you’re not a fan of this movie, I’m sure you can still appreciate what an impressive piece of editing it is, which today’s writer eloquently points out for us. And so…

Third place:

Sicario (editor Joe Walker) [98 points / 16 votes]

Second place:

Creed (editors Michael P. Shawver and Claudia Costello) [104 points / 18 votes]

And the Muriel goes (decisively) to…

2015 Muriel Awards: Best Supporting Performance, Male

One exciting thing about this year’s awards is that there were a decent number of close races, particularly in the performance categories. So while 2015 saw a lot of good performances, none really dominated in the minds of the voters, leaving us to cast a wide net. This is especially apparent in the supporting actor category – our winner didn’t even garner the highest number of votes. That’s a testament to how much affection this guy engenders in fans of the movie, I’d say.

Third place:

Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies [147 points / 23 votes]

Second place:

Oscar Isaac, Ex Machina [150 points / 24 votes]

And the Muriel goes to…

2015 Muriel Awards: 10th Anniversary Award

And now, the first of this year’s Anniversary Awards. It’s always interesting to see what this group will go for in these categories. I’m particularly curious to see what we vote for with next year’s 10th anniversary award, when we finally catch up with the first year we handed out Muriels. Has our favorite film of 2006 stood the test of time, or has it been surpassed by something else in the ensuing decade? Tune in next year to find out!

Meanwhile…

Third place:

Caché [117 points / 17 votes]

Second place:

A History of Violence [135 points / 21 votes]

And the Muriel goes to…

2015 Muriel Awards: Best Supporting Performance, Female

Welcome one and all to the tenth annual Muriel Awards. In case you’re joining us for the first time this year, I’ll be announcing one winner per day beginning tonight and continuing through our countdown to the Golden Muriel for Best Picture in March 6. As always, I’ll be posting the top three finishers in this category, with your winner to be announced after the jump, complete with a written appreciation from one of our valued Muriels voters. So without further ado…

Third place:

Alicia Vikander, Ex Machina [120 points / 19 votes]

Second place:

Jennifer Jason Leigh, The Hateful Eight [142 points / 21 votes]

And this year’s first Muriel winner…

10 Years of Muriel Memories: 2014-2015

So… what have we learned?


Every voter has something to contribute, even if it’s only a ballot. Each person makes a difference. Some voters have lots of time to pen written pieces for the Muriels, while others don’t. Some people are professional critics, others simply enthusiasts. Some people have seen 200-some new movies from a given year, while others will be lucky to have seen 25% of that. I remember one year when a voter sent in a ballot in which none of the new-release categories were completed, but all of the anniversary awards were full of wonderful classic-film choices. Alas, I couldn’t get much use from that person’s ballot that year, but the memory stuck with me, and this year I actually started something called the “Classics Committee” for voters who don’t have the time to keep up with new movies the way they once did, but would still like to participate in the anniversary awards and Hall of Fame voting. Because if a voter wants to participate, we should give him or her a chance to do so.

Be open to outside input, but don’t just blindly adopt everything that others suggest. Prior to instituting the Hall of Fame, a voter suggested the idea of adding a 75th Anniversary Award, which was an intriguing idea, but I figured that considering a number of voters every year aren’t comfortable voting for movies that are fifty years old, even more would balk at choosing movies that are even older than that. Similarly, someone (OK, it was me) floated the idea of adding an award for the best female-directed film, but I reconsidered when some other voters rightly offered the opinion that we shouldn’t ghettoize movies directed by females, or minorities, or what have you, but instead make a greater effort to seek these movies out along with other, higher-profile titles. Speaking of which…

Diversity (in many different forms) is a good thing. Embrace it. I think we’ve done a fairly decent job over the years honoring minorities and giving at least a fair amount of attention to female filmmakers. That said, I realize that we could stand to add more women, ethnic minorities, non-Americans, and LGBT voters to our ranks. That’s something I’ve known for years, and I plan on making an even greater effort in the future to make this a reality. Nonetheless, I like to think that even if we don’t look particularly diverse in terms of gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation, we do have a certain level of diversity of experience and taste, with voters from all over the USA, plus Canada, South America, and Europe. So that’s something, I’d say.

Not every year is going to be equally interesting in retrospect. When you commit yourself to write about ten years of Muriels, do so in the knowledge that the project is going to be highly digressive and that each piece won’t necessarily be strictly tethered to a particular year. This should be self-explanatory, really.

Sometimes bad things are going to happen. Roll with the punches, and learn from your mistakes when necessary. I’ve already told you about the awkward 2012-13 Muriels, in which we essentially copied the Skandies winners in every. Single. Category. Then there was the year (I believe it was 2008-09) when I made the mistake of unveiling our Best Picture countdown on the same day as the Oscar ceremony, which resulted in a high level of interest for the early announcements, and far less activity as the day wore on. Lesson learned: from that point on, we never announced Best Picture on Oscar Sunday again, and when we did have to announce something on that day, we made sure to do it earlier in the afternoon, well before everyone’s attention was on the Oscars. After all, it’s important to…

Know your place. We don’t claim to be the Oscars. Hell, we don’t even claim to be the Skandies. I’m fully willing to accept that we aren’t all that interesting to most people who aren’t Muriels voters. Therefore, I appreciate each and every person who takes an interest in the Muriels, voter or not. Besides, if the spotlight isn’t on us, that just gives us more freedom to let our collective freak flag fly, right?

And above all, have fun. It’s hard enough being the guy who tallies the votes and nags the voters for written pieces. If you don’t enjoy it, why do it?

Coming tomorrow: The first of this year’s Muriel Award winners, to be announced to at least a small amount of fanfare around 7 PM Eastern. See you then!

10 Years of Muriel memories: 2013-2014

After doing the Muriels for a few years, it began to despair that the group was only really active for a month or so every year. Everyone would fill out their ballots, I’d tabulate results and assign written pieces, and we’d announce the winners. And that would be it for 10 months or so, when the next voting season rolled around. So for a few years, I pondered on the idea of how to keep willing voters active in the “off-season.” My first idea was to keep the blog going with regular exclusive content, but neither Steve nor I had the time to make that happen. For a year or two, we ran a blogathon at Our Science, but we didn’t keep it going.


Finally, after the Skuriels were over, it occurred to me – why can’t we do something similar every year? At one point a voter suggested that we do our own take on the cinematic canon in order to double back and recognize films older than the fifty-year anniversary award. Of course, this would be for Muriel voters only – D’Angelo was clear that the Skuriels were a one-off thing, and I’m OK with that. Nonetheless, I liked the idea of giving Muriel voters something else to vote on during the summer months, and giving them another shot at honoring classic cinema was even more appealing. So began the Muriels Hall of Fame.

Three years in, I think we’ve done a pretty darn good job. Naturally, we’ve picked off a lot of the obvious stuff – plenty of Hitchcock, Welles, Kurosawa and the like – but you’ll have that when you ask people to choose the best and notable films in classic cinema. And I’d say we’ve made a few unexpected choices as well. I know I wouldn’t have predicted that we’d include movies like Man With a Movie Camera, Sansho the Bailiff, and Duck Amuck in our first forty or so picks. And I’m genuinely proud that we’ve taken the opportunity to recognize a film by a female director fairly early in the game – namely Agnès Varda’s lovely Cleo From 5 to 7. I hope we honor more female-directed films in the next few years (The House Is Black always appears on my ballot), as well as more films from Eastern Europe, Africa, South America, the Middle East, and East Asia countries other than Japan. But it’ll happen.

As for the Muriels themselves, they keep chugging along. 2013 was another strong year for us, and by popular demand we instituted the category of Best Documentary. Now that the technology necessary to make a movie has become more widely available than ever, there has been a surge in nonfiction filmmaking in recent years, and we wanted to honor that in a way we’ve never had the chance to do previously. I only regret that we were too late to recognize the great documentaries from the year 2011, particularly the game-changing This Is Not a Film, in which Jafar Panahi, one of the world’s great filmmakers, pushed against limitations that would have Lars von Trier salivating (both house arrest and a legal ban from directing movies) by shooting an intimate work in his home and partially using an iPhone, then piecing the film together and smuggling it out of Iran in a cake so that it could be seen by the world. It’s the other end of the spectrum from big-budget Muriel favorites like WALL*E and The Departed, but it belongs just as much in the world of cinema that the Muriel Awards seeks to recognize every year.

Coming tomorrow: my final Muriel memories piece. So what have we learned?

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.

10 Years of Muriel Memories: 2011-2012

In discussing the history of the Muriels, I would be remiss not to mention some of the personal changes that have happened along the way. Most notably, I became a family man, meeting the lovely Angela in 2008 and eventually marrying her in 2011 to start a family with her and her (now our) son. But with all the commitments that have come with having a family, some things have been back-burnered. More specifically, I just haven’t had time to watch movies like I used to when I was single. To wit – in 2007, I watched more than 150 new releases, whereas I tend to average 60-70 nowadays, nearly all of which I end up catching on DVD or streaming on Netflix.

In 2011, something happened that had never happened before – a movie won a Muriel Award before I’d had a chance to see it. The movie was Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation, which took Best Screenplay that year in addition to contending for a number of other awards, including placing #3 in Best Film. Of course, the primary reason for my not seeing it until after the Muriels deadline is because of Sony Pictures Classics and their, well… leisurely release patterns, in which many Oscar-nominated foreign films don’t arrive in Central Ohio until after the Oscar telecast. Thankfully, I was able to catch up with the film while it was still in theatres later that winter, and I ended up making it part of probably the greatest new-release double feature I’ve yet experienced, at the tail end of a night in which I also took in Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret (two masterpieces, says I).

2011 was also the year of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, which like its 2009 and 2010 Best Film-winning counterparts, also walked off with roughly half a dozen Muriels in total. Yet there were plenty of other interesting films in the mix, including Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy (#2 in Best Film, as well as Best Female Lead), Take Shelter (Best Male Lead for Michael Shannon, plus a top-10 finish in Best Film), Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, and more. All this plus breakout years for two performers who would quickly become Muriel favorites, Michael Fassbender and Jessica Chastain. It’s almost enough to make you forget our rather unorthodox choice of Melissa McCarthy for Best Female Supporting.

What my recent years of movie-watching have taught me with regards to the Muriels is that you just can’t see everything you want to see. In the first few years after the Muriels began, I would tie myself in knots trying to cram as many movies into my moviegoing year as possible, in the interest of making the most comprehensive Muriels ballot I could. But my more recent experiences have taught me that’s more than just impossible –it’s downright undesirable. For me anyway, there’s little joy in ticking titles off a list from a sense of perceived obligation. If I want to see something, I’ll see it. And if I can’t end up seeing it until after I have to complete my ballot, that’s just fine. Even now that I’m seeing less than half the new movies I once saw, I still see plenty of good stuff to complete a perfectly respectable ballot, and sometimes I still have to make some difficult choices in leaving off worthy picks.

Thanks as always to Ang for being so understanding and patient with me every time Muriels season rolls around. Telling you all the winners before anyone else knows (don’t get any ideas, people!) is a small price for me to pay for all her love and support.

Coming tomorrow: The Muriels cozy up to the Skandies in more ways than one.

10 Years of Muriel Memories: 2010-2011

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.

10 Years of Muriel Memories - 2009-2010

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.

10 Years of Muriel Memories – 2008-2009

If there’s one truism that’s served me well in my time with the Muriels, it’s the idea that one must adapt to survive. In order to keep the Muriels fresh, one must keep an eye on what’s working and get rid of what isn’t. After our first year, we decided to add some extra categories (body of work, music, and the anniversary awards) and consolidate the two breakthrough categories into one. But the 2008/2009 Muriels were the first time we chose to eliminate a category because we felt like the voters weren’t crazy about it. The category? Best DVD Release. This isn’t to say our voters didn’t watch DVDs – in fact, a number of them saw many if not most of their movies new and old in the comfort of their homes. However, after two years, it was fairly clear to us that there was very little consensus in the category, largely because there were so many DVDs being released every year and so many means by which to gauge how good they were. How to decide? Best to do away with it altogether, so we did, and replaced it with the category that eventually came to be called “Best Web-Based Criticism” before itself fading out in 2011.


Another adaptation we made in 2008 was that both Steve and I joined the social media age. Following the example of Mike D’Angelo, we both got Twitter accounts and quickly fell into a rapidly expanding circle of online movie nerds. I quickly realized that this would be a great way to connect with potential new voters, and I began inviting one new Twitter friend after another (I’m not exaggerating- I recall one afternoon when I probably sent out a dozen invites in rapid succession). In addition, we encouraged existing voters to suggest possible invitees to us, and a number of them obliged. All told, as a result of our rather, well, AGGRESSIVE invitation push, voting numbers rose from 20 in 2007 to 37 in 2008.

As for the awards themselves, I was beginning to despair that after two years we still hadn’t forged our own path taste-wise, and in the case of both the 2006 and 2007 Best Picture winners, we were content to simply rubber-stamp the Academy Awards’ selections. Granted, The Departed and No Country For Old Men were both great choices both for the Oscars and the Muriels, but I still wanted to know if we could do our own thing rather than simply following the crowd. As it turns out, I needn’t have worried. Granted, 2008 was a historically weak year for the Oscars Best Picture category, both in terms of nominees and eventual winner (ugh) Slumdog Millionaire. Nonetheless, it was a nice surprise that we settled not only on a film that wasn’t pre-approved by the A.M.P.A.S., but actually had received few if any Best Picture awards of note – Pixar’s animated android odyssey WALL*E. Likewise, there were no Oscar nominees in our top 10 films of the year, falling well below more eccentric choices as Rachel Getting Married, A Christmas Tale, Synecdoche, New York, and Burn After Reading (STILL the Coens’ most underappreciated movie, darn it).

Then, once we’d announced all the Muriels for 2008, we dropped one last announcement – I decided to step down, at least temporarily, as the Muriels major domo, continuing on in a behind-the-scenes role while leaving most of the big responsibilities and decisions to Steve. My reason, as I announced at the time, was because I had decided to go back to school (to take courses in business and accounting, to be specific), which would require a time commitment that wouldn’t permit me to devote the attention to the Muriels that I believed they deserved. I’m still thankful that Steve was able to pick up the slack for me while I was getting edumacated, and once I finished taking the courses I needed (in 2013 – oof), I was more than happy to take back the reins, just in time for Steve to pursue a number of non-Muriels commitments of his own. A venture like this is only as good as the people who are willing to commit their time to make it work, and I’m grateful to everyone who has contributed to the Muriels in some way or other through the years.

Coming tomorrow: the Muriels finally get some attention from… well, not Hollywood, but from various showbiz types from all over the world. Fun times!

10 Years of Muriel Memories: 2007-2008

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.

10 Years of Muriels Memories – 2006-2007

Note: I’ll be posting my memories of the Muriel Awards every day leading up to this year’s Muriels unveiling. I’ve labeled each post based on both the year of the films being awarded and the year in which the awards were actually presented. In this case, the awards were for 2006 films but were presented in 2007.


A lot of you have probably heard about how Steve Carlson and I hatched the idea for the Muriels back in December 2006 while we were watching Out 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image. It really was that simple – one of us turned to the other (during an intermission, naturally) and said something like, “hey, wouldn’t it be cool to start up a movie poll for us and some of our friends?” Once we agreed that it would, in fact, be cool, we went about sketching out how we wanted to make it happen. I came up with some rules and voting categories, he rounded up most of the voters with the exception of a few personal friends I brought to the party, and we kind of rushed a ballot out to the voters we’d enlisted by the end of the year.

One thing we didn’t have yet was a name. When I first sent out the ballots, I actually included a space in which the voters might suggest a name under which we could operate – after all, an (INSERT NAME HERE) Movie Award just wouldn’t have much mystique, y’know? However, when the ballots started coming in, there were no suggestions that really sounded right. I somewhat hastily began brainstorming for something that if nothing else might serve as a temporary name until the right name came along, and I settled on the name of my guinea pig, Muriel. I ran this by the other voters and was surprised by how positive the reaction was, so it stuck.

Once the ballot deadline arrived that first year, I started tabulating the ballots from our 13 voters, which seems like nothing now but felt pretty daunting at the time. After I tallied all the votes, it turned out that we had a tie for Best Film – specificially, Children of Men and United 93. I was a little uneasy about kicking off the first year by announcing a tie for our top award, so I ended up sending out an e-mail to the voters asking them all to choose one or the other, and the one with more votes would be our winner for the year. However, as the runoff votes started to roll in, I received a mail from someone else asking whether I’d received his ballot. I hadn’t, and asked him to re-send it, and when I received it and added in his votes, his #1 placement of The Departed in the Best Film category caused it to overtake both the previous “winners” and claim the award for itself.

I appreciate everyone who has ever participated in the Muriels, but I have a special place in my heart for those people who’ve been with the group ever since the beginning. To commemorate our tenth year, I wanted to try to involve as many original voters as I could in one way or another. Now, some people just aren’t keeping up with new movies like they once did, or they’re busy in some other way, and I can respect that. But there were a handful of people I was unable to locate, and that’s a shame. However, I’d like to offer my thanks to all of the 2006-2007 Muriels voters who were able to participate in this year’s awards:

Jason Alley
Kent Beeson
Andrew Bemis
Steven Carlson
Dennis Cozzalio
James Frazier
Mark Pfeiffer

Thanks, guys!

Coming tomorrow: the Muriels get snazzy in our second year, and we get some old-media attention – along with a touch of controversy.