excellent work as always. did the new voting format increase participation any? i like the at-a-glance winners-only summary you posted in GD. that should be somewhere in here, if not at the top.

as for the awards, i usually trash our snobby latte-sipping tastes, and i'd be completely justified doing it again here (only one of our nine winners were from a film that cleared more than $50 mil at the box office). i won't though 'cause selma, whiplash, and nightcrawler are all excellent films and it's not at all hard to see why they'd appeal to our demographic. maybe dividing the votes up by category instead of having everybody make their own individual posts reduced the amount of ballots that were just one long humblebrag about all the obscure films someone saw. i wish more blockbusters got shine here (think guardians of the galaxy or lego movie, though i wasn't anywhere near as into those as most), but i can live with what we did here. we whiffed on interstellar, but at least there are no holy motors.

biggest snubs by far are eddie red, mayne, and julianne moore not even getting noms. i'm guessing not enough saw theory of everything or still alice, as they're not really in our lane (and honestly they're not so much legit movies as they are acting showcases), but then i see much more obscure movies getting noms and it's like hmm. our oyelowo and pike lattes are fine replacements for the academy's choices though. our biggest W is giving no hardware to the grand budapest hotel, which is an unwatchable disaster that the academy fell head over heels for.

and it goes without saying that we killed the academy this year. our nominees and winners are just head and shoulders above theirs. reading the anonymous ballots on hollywood reporter (and i realize they select those partly to stir up controversy), it's staggering how stupid the voting process is of actual academy members. "nightcrawler was gross, so that's out." "whiplash was all about abuse, i can't reward that." "i was really offended when the cast of selma spoke out against police brutality; we need to squash that kind of political posturing in the oscar race (i.e. the kind i can't relate to because i'm a middle-aged white man living in beverly hills)." just staggering.

all in all, take a bow, kids. we put another great year in the books and we've got an even bigger one coming up (tarantino, crooze, terminator, bond, jurassic world, avengers, star wars). don't forget to tip your boy franklin on the way out.