My Worst-Of 2024 List. About Best-Of 2024 Lists
5 observations about the stultifying sameness of everyone's year-end top 10s
It’s “Best of” Season . . . when very very serious critics and significantly less serious variety show producers will huddle together around their hearths to boil a year of opining, bloviating, chin-scratching and finger-wagging down to one bite-sized top 10 list.
The lure is irresistible. I’m sure I’ll be making one before the calendar turns.
Lists are raining down on our heads like the snow of a freakish out-of-season climate change blizzard, and let’s not forget with FYC season bringing Santa’s bag of billions to the list-o-sphere, using these rankings to herd the AMPAS cattle towards an eventual consensus is some high-stakes, no-limit poker.
So how are we to sort the real lists from the, shall we say, less serious players in the listing game? Before you’re buried head-first in a month and a half of lists, a few rules of engagement for the discerning Best Of consumer.
I. Anyone’s Allowed to Play
First, let’s dispense with the idea that any one person is inherently more or less entitled to be in the list-making — or nominating — business than any other.
In olden times, the only people allowed to share their opinions about what were the best or worst movies or performances or shows of a given year were the official critics of newspapers and magazines, or the members of the Academies.
And what made people “Official Critics”? Was a degree required? Some sort of certification of their seriousness? Sometimes. Just as often it was the reporter who had paid their dues on the housing beat and deserved a cushier assignment. Or was boarding school roommates with the publisher’s nephew.
Pre-internet, if you weren’t an officially knighted critic and you had opinions about the best movies of the year, you could . . .
