Here at the Moonlight Awards, we’re honoring the “best” movie of each year in cinema history - or at least that’s what we say we’re doing.
But it’s not entirely accurate.
Let’s get a little more specific:
Here at the Moonlight Awards, we’re honoring the one film from each year that’s come to be generally recognized as the “best.”
In other words, we’re looking for the films that got remembered. We’re looking for the films that still appeal to audiences, years and decades later; the films that had the biggest influence on directors and actors and cinema history; and the films that critics and scholars today still hold up and say, “Hey, y’all, this one’s important. This one’s great. If you only see one movie from 1943, this is the one you ought to see.”
In other words: today, right now, which films from - let’s say 1943 - do regular folks still watch? Which films from 1943 have had the greatest impact? And which films from 1943 do today's scholars hold up as being especially important? The films we recognize (ideally) will be the ones that meet all three criteria: scholars appreciate them, critics and filmmakers learn from them, and the general public remembers them and continues to spend time with them.
But how do you identify the “best” movie of a year? What’s our process?
Here’s what we did:
First, we scoured critics’ lists of the “best” movies of all time. The journal Sight & Sound conducts a very well-respected survey every ten years, so we started with that - and then we explored other lists, from the BBC to the AFI to the Hollywood Reporter and beyond.
After that, we turned to public opinion: we looked at audience surveys, popular journals, and even user votes on IMDB, to try to get a sense of which films still get watched by folks today.
From there, we made a list of about 10 to 15 movies from each year that seemed to rise to the top in both categories…
...and then we sent that list to a few dozen highly-respected film scholars, and asked them to rank the films according to their taste. (We also encouraged them to cast write-in votes, if there were any important films we were missing.)
And after all that, we compiled our data - the critics’ rankings, the audience favorites, and the scholars’ picks - and chose our five best-picture nominees, and our one Moonlight Award winner, from each year.
And that’s our process.
Of course it’s not an exact science. Scholars and general audiences don’t always agree with each other, and there’s more critical agreement in some years than others. Some years (1936) there’s one movie that obviously stands out as the ‘best,’ but there’s not a clear top five. Other years (1935) there is a clear top five, but any of those five could make a case for number one. (One especially fun year is 1966: there’s a clear top nine, but I have no idea how we’re going to narrow it down any further.)
So we’ll make our picks, and you can disagree, and (with any luck) that will generate fun and exciting and insightful conversations.
And isn’t that what awards season is really about?
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