there was a stretch where we were nominating movies based almost entirely on their obscurity, and it was largely due to snobs wanting to brag about what movies they'd seen. here's our best picture list in 2013:

Amour
Holy Motors
The Master
Moonrise Kingdom
Zero Dark Thirty

absolutely absurd. there's a french movie here that barely cracked half a million in u.s. box office and happened to be garbage (holy motors). there's another french movie here that made about $6 mil in u.s. box office and was also garbage (amour).

and we're supposed to believe that here on a hip-hop message board full of 20-to-30-something-year-old guys that we're all watching these experimental artsy-fartsy french flicks that almost literally no one else in america has seen, and we're nominating them for best picture over mainstream american flicks like django unchained, which played directly to our demographic, did nearly half a billion in worldwide box office, and was easily-- by any measure-- one of the best movies of that year.

it was pure unadulterated snobbery that had nothing to do with the quality of what was coming out of hollywood and everything to do with a weird circle jerk that developed here where people were using their nomination lists just to brag how obscure their tastes in movies were. i led the fight against it and it thankfully seems to have stopped. but i think frank changing the nomination process had something to do with it as well. we used to post our entire ballot in one post. now we break them up so you've got ten different posts, one for each category. it cut down on the vanity factor, so now people are just nominating the movies they actually enjoyed instead of trying to impress everybody with the number of empty theaters they sat in.