Tag Archives: The Sting

Re-Awarding the Academy Award for Best Picture (1970-1974)

“And the winner is…Crash? Wait that can’t be r…”

~What Jack Nicholson Should Have Said in 2006

oscars

Like it or not, the Academy Awards carry a lot of influence in terms of what movies we deem to be worth remembering. It doesn’t matter if it’s about a ruthless mob family, or the subtleties of fish fucking, the Academy Award for Best Picture ensures all winners go down in history.

But sometimes history is wrong, and in the case of the Academy Awards, it’s wrong often. Now, Academy Award voters don’t have the benefit of hindsight, but we do. We have all the hindsight. ALL OF IT.

That’s why we decided to go through every Academy Award ceremony from 1970 through 2009 and give out those Best Picture Oscars one more time. Sometimes this will mean that the same movie is going to win. But a lot of the time, we’re going to be taking away Academy Awards and giving them to more deserving films.

Yes, you are going to get mad a lot reading this series. And yes, you are going to be very confused by our decision to go with the year each award was given out, as opposed to the year the winning movies were released. Listen, when you make an omelette, you’re going to mix up a few metaphors, alright?

Here’s what we’re going to do. For each Academy Award ceremony, we’ll tell you who won, and who else was nominated. We will list the IMDB user rating for each film—it’s an imperfect marker of quality, for sure, but it at least can give you an idea of how the general public views the movie today.

Then, we’ll tell you which movie gets the AFFotD-awarded Oscar. For all we know, the movie might end up being one that wasn’t even nominated. Either way, we’ll go through the important movies that came out each year, and tell you who wins that designated Oscar (again, remember, the ceremony takes place after the movies are released, so the 1970 ceremony is for 1969 movies, 1971 is for 1970, etc.) All clear? Good.

So strap yourselves in, because the next few weeks, America Fun Fact of the Day is going to fix the Academy Awards. You’re welcome.

Re-Awarding the Academy Award for Best Picture (1970-1974)

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The American Joys of Spam (Not the Tasty Food Kind)

“Fr33 V1agrA l0w p4armas21cal pr1c3s!s!!!!!!!”

~The Internet

America is a well oiled machine fueled by skepticism.  When we see a homeless person aggressively panhandling on the street we assume, rightly or wrongly, that the person does not deserve our hard earned money, since they’ll just spend that money on drugs.  Besides, we’re in a rush and that quart of vodka is not going to buy itself, now is it?

We Americans are a cautious people, many of us so jaded that you can try for a lifetime and never earn our trust.  This is part of what makes America great, and it’s directly responsible for our world power.  When the 1930s came around, did we “let bygones be bygones” and start trusting Germany, or attempt to ally with Germany?  Hell no, we thought, “wait, this looks familiar…hmm…”  Well, except for, like, Walt Disney and Henry Ford.

How do we keep our healthy level of wary suspicion going so strong?  What enables us to write our children out of our will because we’re like 75% sure that they sided with their mother during the divorce proceedings?  Where do we find the strength and courage to speed past a car with a flat tire during a rainstorm because of that one time where we heard someone getting murdered like that?

Spam, that’s how.  Every day, our inboxes are flooded with hollow, empty promises, and the constant inundation of these penile enlargement offers or attractive girls who like to take off their clothes if you click this suspicious looking link.  Though we suppose if you trained yourself to think that pop-up windows were boobs, your computer would then be like, just so many boobs you guys.  Spam is named after the Spam Monty Python skit, which while not technically American, is still actually pretty damn cool.  Surprisingly, America is not the leading source of spam messages- with an estimated 6.6 trillion spam emails originating in the U.S., we trail Brazil’s 7.7 trillion spam messages, which ranks right up there with the fact that the first Heisman Trophy winner played at University of Chicago as one of the all time, “holy hell, I did not expect that to be the case” random factoids.

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