This week was the official unveiling of the latest Sight & Sound poll results. (My predictions, at least for the critics, were pretty accurate. The directors were a little more surprising.) For Deadspin, I crunched some numbers and offered some analysis. What I didn't do was try to figure out what it all "means." Ever since I've become a member of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, I'm much more sensitive to this idea that poll results say something about a particular group. Speaking for my fellow LAFCA members, we're such a bunch of ornery individuals that we're completely uninterested in sending some sort of message through our end-of-the-year awards. I find it hard to believe, therefore, that a collection of critics and directors living all over the globe are unified in a way for their collective results to "mean" anything other than, hey, these are the movies they consider the greatest. Now that I've gotten that out of the way, let the obsessiveness begin.
