Culture Snob 
Vantage Point took first place this week with the lowest winning score in Box Office Power Rankings history. Granted, that’s less than a year, but still … .
A heretical question about Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood: Is Daniel Plainview a good person? The inquiry is an overstatement, because the answer is obvious: Of course not. But contrary to the assessments of many critics, I don’t think Plainview is evil, and more than that I’m not convinced he’s much different from most of us. Plus: Michael Clayton.
Between the initial calculations and now, my Box Office Power Rankings-derived formula has not changed its Oscar conclusion: No Country for Old Men is still your Best Picture winner on Sunday.
In this week’s edition of the Box Office Power Rankings, I was planning to address critical disconnect – not between arbiters and their audiences but between critics and themselves. Specifically, I was curious about movies with which there is a large gap between Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic scores. In this week’s rankings, the extremes were Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour (Rotten Tomatoes: 85; Metacritic: 59) and Step Up 2 the Streets (Rotten Tomatoes: 25; Metacritic: 51).
Hannah Montana, meet Daniel Plainview. In my absence, I’ve let the Box Office Power Rankings slip, so here are three weeks’ worth. And we get the strange chart-topping pair of There Will Be Blood (January 25-27) and Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour (February 1-3 and 8-10).
It was summer 1969, in southern Illinois. The father of Bride of Culture Snob took the mother of Bride of Culture Snob to the movies to escape the heat. She was pregnant, carrying Bride of Culture Snob. His choice? Rosemary’s Baby.
Cloverfield ended Juno’s three-week reign atop the Box Office Power Rankings over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend. Juno, by the way, is the only one of this year’s crop of Best Picture nominees (so far) to hold sole possession of first place in our esteemed rankings.
As a member of the choir, I ran screaming from the church because of Michael Moore’s preaching in Sicko. Plus: the equally inept Infamous.
This isn’t a list of the “best” songs of 2007, or even my favorites. It’s a personal 2007 compilation that tries to capture my experience with music over the past 12 months. The songs are meant to play off each other – sometimes in obvious ways, often not – and there’s a purpose to the sequencing.
A few months ago, I promised that I’d try to use the basic Box Office Power Rankings formula to predict a Best Picture winner. The hypothesis is that Best Picture winners tend to have a blend of prestige and popularity, and that a quantitative measure of those qualities might have predictive value.