About the Blog

This blog began as a way to document my Quest to see every film nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress.

I have a certain fascination with the Academy Awards. There’s something interesting to me about how complex our feelings toward it are. How meaningless they are, and yet, at the same time, how much of a gold standard they are. And yet, despite us knowing that they’re meaningless, we still manage to have strong opinions about them nonetheless. I love that. The Quest was about me wanting to see more movies, as well as a way for me to feed my fascination with this whole Academy Award institution.

The idea for the blog came a few months into it as I said, “What’s the point of doing it if no one knows about it?” So it was for empirical proof, first and foremost. The other reason I made it was so I could stop being asked by people, “What movies should I watch?” I hate that question. Because odds are, if you ask that question, I don’t know what your tastes are, which completely negates the point of the exercise. It doesn’t work like that. “You’ve seen a lot of movies, tell me what movies to watch.” There’s a saturation point. I’ve seen so much stuff that I wouldn’t even know where to begin with that. So it’s easier to know people’s tastes before I can recommend stuff. Which is impossible in a one-way situation like this. So, I figured the blog could be used to spell out my film tastes exactly, providing a sample size of over 1,500 films (and trust me, if you’ve read enough of this blog, you know exactly what I like and don’t like). Now, people can just see how my tastes match theirs, and create their own recommendations from this gigantic pile of films I’m recommending. (See the “Favorite Films” tab up top for a place to start. And then the “Oscar Quest Pages” tab to go completely down the rabbit hole.)

Now that was the original purpose of the blog. Since then, it’s branched out. To what exactly, I don’t know. But it’s more. It’s still almost entirely movies, since I’ve yet to finish writing up the Oscar Quest (and if you’re reading this after, say — August — I’ve forgotten to update this), but once that’s done, I will branch out into — well, whatever it is I want to talk about. Which, admittedly, will be almost entirely movies, but whatever, it’s my blog, I’ll do what I want.

By the way, I’d like to point out that I’ve personally written every article on this blog. It started on January 1, 2011 (1/1/11) and since then, at least one fully written article (i.e. not a Pic of the Day) has gone up every day since then. I’ve put a lot of work into this thing. Appreciate that.