Let’s be honest here. Best Picture is the prize that matters most. Your choices in the category to date are as follows: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Batman Begins, The Departed, No Country for Old Men, The Dark Knight, and Up. Stating the obvious, you’re all a bunch of Batman nerds. Still, every film you have selected here would be on the short list in any conversation about the best movies of the 2000s. Your movie taste is sublime, BOPites.

Joining the illustrious movie library above is the 2011 winner for Best Picture, Inception. So, I guess I should update the statement above from “you’re all a bunch of Batman nerds” to “you’re all a bunch of Christopher Nolan nerds”. Seriously, how many of you are blood relatives of his? We’ve administered these awards for seven years now; Nolan has won three times. He has only released one other movie in that time frame. Just because I was curious, I went back and looked at what went wrong with The Prestige in 2007. You only voted it 11th. Were some of you sick in the early part of that year? How else do we explain this?



In terms of the top five, you agreed with us entirely on the selections involved, only tweaking the order a bit. We gave The Social Network a slight nod over Inception; you are in the tank for Christopher Nolan enough that Inception won by a moderate amount. We thought Toy Story 3 was the fifth best movie of the year; you say third. We thought True Grit was the third best movie of the year; you say fifth. We did reach an accord on Black Swan being the fourth best movie of the year. It’s nice to have such common ground.

You were smarter than some of my compatriots at BOP, selecting How to Train Your Dragon as the sixth best movie of the year. Even with my first place vote, it only finished eighth among our staff. Stuff like this is why democracy doesn’t work. Anyway, you were also with us on The King’s Speech and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, meaning we lined up on 80% of the Best Picture selections this year. Our disagreement is that BOP championed a couple of smaller releases, Winter’s Bone and Exit Through the Gift Shop, while our readers went for more conventional choices in The Fighter and 127 Hours. All in all, this category represented a freakish amount of unanimity between the readers and staff at BOP.

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