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Saturday, March 22, 2008

Might the Greatest Movies be determined differently?

I'm considering making a change to my 100 Greatest Movies Project. You may recall that the Greatest Movies Project is an attempt to build the consensus list of 100 Greatest Movies from all the lists that have come before.

Except it's not.

Simply put, the situation at the start of the list - in the realm of the 90s - is such that a film can make the list with only three, or even two, lists mentioning it. That's hardly "consensus". I've been considering a 1, 5, or 10 point bonus to the standard Borda count for each list a film appears on, which would also allow me to use parts of lists that go beyond 100, like imdB.

On the other hand, keep this in mind. Under the current system, a film getting rankings of 20, 50 and 80 gets 81, 51 and 21 points, which equals 153 points. That's the same amount of points as a film getting a 40 and a 9. So one film is beloved by more people but the other has more devoted fans. One would think those would be equivalent, right? Or, even, the film with the more devoted fans should be deserving of a higher spot?

So perhaps I should reconsider looking into the other voting systems I mentioned in my very first post on the Greatest Movies Project, all of which have their various positive aspects. Many of them would probably be more work for me, but they might produce better lists. Of course "better" is in the eye of the beholder... What are your thoughts?

Oh, and I just want to remind you that you can be part of the 100 Greatest Movies Project and get your name in lights! If you want to write about the Greatest Movies for the Project, comment on this post or e-mail me at mwmailsea at yahoo dot com.

Tuesday, March 18, 2008

It's that time of year again...

Time to reveal my bracket for this year's NCAA tournament! Last year I used the Washington Post's bracket contest, but after using Yahoo Sports' NFL-prediction system last season, I went back to Yahoo for my bracket this year.