After last year's blowout victory for The Dark Knight, you folks experienced the same difficulty in picking the best film of 2009 as we had. Collectively, our BOP readers narrowed down the list to the same seven releases as we did with the only variation being the order selection. In point of fact, 9 out of our top 12 Best Picture nominations for the year were also in your composite Divine Dozen as well.

The only three we liked more than you are State of Play, Fantastic Mr. Fox and Watchmen. Even on the latter two of those, you had them in your top 20, simply not quite as high. State of Play was the outlier in terms of our opinion versus yours. Since it was my second favorite title of the year, this is my opportunity to ask you to give it a look if you haven't already. As a group, you were bigger fans of (500) Days of Summer, our 18th selection in the Best Picture category, Precious, our 21st selection, and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, our 13th selection. In short, we all shared a hive mind about the best films of the year, which means we are something of an echo chamber on the topic.





What we the staff and you the readers finally settled upon is that Up was the Best Picture of 2009. Of course, you were not as certain on the point as we were. In the Calvins race for Best Picture, Up won handily by 40% over our penultimate favorite, The Hurt Locker. The margin of victory for Up in the Reader Awards was only 8% with the difference between first and fourth place being less than 20%. Last year, the difference between The Dark Knight and WALL-E, the second place selection in your balloting, was over 30%. A schism developed in the voting between the people's box office choice not just of 2009 but of all time, Avatar, as well as Quentin Tarantino's most commercial film, Inglourious Basterds, and the sci-fi triumph, District 9. Star Trek was also in the mix to win for an extended period before faltering a bit at the end.

For the 2010 awards, we had 32% more participation (by the way, thank you for that....we love you people) while still winding up with a photo finish. I must admit that I believed all along that Avatar would eventually surpass Up due to the sheer volume of people who have seen and enjoyed it. Once again, I underrated the exquisite taste of our readers as you chose quality over quantity. In fact, your overall top 15 is an exceptional list and you should be commended for an exceptional display of group-think, echo chamber or not.

Return to Reader Awards main page

---