My little experiment to give users the chance to vote on the best films of 2009 was certainly an interesting one as the first round went a little haywire in the beginning with a group of fans attempting to game the system by not following the rules. This forced me to create a script to clean the votes up to make sure the results were balanced. Even the second round had a number of people whose votes were ultimately deleted because they couldn’t seem to follow the rules and count all the way up to eight. However, when all was said and done the second round included votes from a total of 1,764 different people and it’s obvious we have a clear-cut fan-decided winner in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. As a result, I am forgoing any further voting and accepting these results as final.
Voters were asked to select from a group of 53 films that were carried over from the first round of 175 films. Of those 53 films voters chose anywhere from eight to ten films as their favorite films of 2009. After 1,764 qualifying votes, Inglourious Basterds received 1,201, which means 68% of all people voting considered Tarantino’s piece of revisionist history one of the best films of the year.
The only other film to crack the one-thousand vote mark was James Cameron’s Avatar with 1,082 votes followed by Pixar’s Up, J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek reboot and finally Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker rounding out the top five.
If you ask me, the most interesting part of these results is how fan excitement seems to be closely mirroring the current projected list of top contenders for Oscar’s Best Picture. Right now I think it is fair to say The Hurt Locker, Avatar and Up In the Air are the three films leading the pack in Oscar pundits’ eyes as potential Best Picture winners. All three of these films are in the top six of our polling, which means fans will have something to cheer for this year, rather than the disappointment suffered last year after The Dark Knight was left out in the cold. I wouldn’t be surprised if this year’s Oscar telecast experiences a major surge in viewership as a result.
With all that said, I give you the Top 25 Films of 2009 as decided by you, or at least those of you that took the time to vote. Share your thoughts below and if you want to see the entire list of results for all 53 films click here, and if you would like to browse my list of Top 25 Films of 2009 you can click here.
- Inglourious Basterds (1201 votes [68.08%])
- Avatar (1082 votes [61.34%])
- Up (963 votes [54.59%])
- Star Trek (807 votes [45.75%])
- The Hurt Locker (796 votes [45.12%])
- Up In the Air (741 votes [42.01%])
- District 9 (723 votes [40.99%])
- 500 Days of Summer (684 votes [38.78%])
- The Hangover (540 votes [30.61%])
- Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire (426 votes [24.15%])
- Where the Wild Things Are (400 votes [22.68%])
- Fantastic Mr. Fox (385 votes [21.83%])
- An Education (368 votes [20.86%])
- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (338 votes [19.16%])
- A Serious Man (336 votes [19.05%])
- Watchmen (324 votes [18.37%])
- Moon (306 votes [17.35%])
- Sherlock Holmes (283 votes [16.04%])
- Zombieland (282 votes [15.99%])
- Public Enemies (272 votes [15.42%])
- Coraline (269 votes [15.25%])
- Julie & Julia (239 votes [13.55%])
- The Blind Side (226 votes [12.81%])
- Taken (223 votes [12.64%])
- A Single Man (221 votes [12.53%])
Next year I will set up a polling system of my own devising to prevent the same issues I ran into this year, making sure people vote properly the first time and I don’t need to babysit along the way. I will also probably start the polling a little later in 2011 to make sure you have more time to see the films included in the poll as I know some films were just hitting theaters and others still haven’t been released in all markets for this year’s polling. Hopefully I’ll be adding more categories as well. Only time will tell.
Either way I hope you had fun and enjoy evaluating the results and comparing the overall list to your personal top tens.
