We have to say, we're not the least bit surprised: The NPR crowd is a famously sober, serious-minded bunch of upstanding citizens. So it was practically a foregone conclusion that the winner in our audience-driven Oscar-alternative contest for the Most Accomplished Film of 2009 would be a touching, lyrical story about a sorrowful elderly gentleman who, in the twilight of his life, sets out to — Squirrel!
That's right: When we asked respondents in NPR's DIY Movie Awards 2010 to pick the year's single most polished exercise in filmmaking, Pixar's Up jumped way out in front — so far and so early that we thought the category was going to be a complete blowout.
Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds and Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker rallied midway through the polling period, however, and eventually closed the gap to tie for second place, just 2 percent shy of Up's 16 percent share of the vote total.
Our guess about the why behind the win? Pixar's fable really was a lovely film. But with a healthy $293 million box-office take on 3,886 screens, Up had also paraded its pretty pictures before more potential-voter eyeballs than the others. Basterds took in a respectable $120 million, while Hurt Locker never played more than 535 theaters and earned a scant $12.6 million in the U.S.
(Could a similar calculus propel Avatar past The Hurt Locker in the final Oscar reckoning? We'll see.)
Fewer surprises cropped up in the other categories, which were designed chiefly as a nose-thumb at the notion that just one picture should have to suffice as The Best. With that in mind, we humbly submit the results charts below — along with the observation that the 57 percent of you who didn't pick The Hangover as Biggest Laugh Riot clearly are in fact a sober, serious-minded bunch of upstanding citizens.
Unlike yours truly, who — this is a true story — laughed so hard when Rob Riggle offhandedly tasered Ed Helms that Diet Coke and Raisinets flew out of my nose.
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