I figured I'd go ahead and post this group a little early. We're starting to get into enjoyable movies here—I wouldn't call any of these classics, or favorites, but the higher ranked movies are definitely ones I would watch again (and I actually do own a few of these).

Best Picture Rankings: Part Three

I think you're going to like the very top of my list.

There were great moments—there was a bit with a bottle on a string hanging outside a window that was wonderfully executed, to name one directorial flourish I remember—but on the whole, the movie just couldn't rise above its subject matter. Put it this way—you could definitely feel the Wilder touch at times, and…

Gump is maybe the first on the list I enjoy/would willingly watch multiple times, but there's just so much that bothers me/I just don't like about it that I couldn't put it any higher. As a whole, it's fine, but individual parts of it are just too much.

Allow me to save you from The Lost Weekend and Gentleman's Agreement: alcoholism is bad, and anti-Semitism is also bad.

One thing I think I can safely say: "message" pictures don't typically age well.

Best Picture Rankings: Part Two

It's just…so…dry and boring. Most of the early winners are toward the bottom of the list (with a couple of exceptions), just because times and tastes (and moviemaking) have changed so much since then. It's not necessarily a knock on the movie—as I recall, the acting was very strong all around—it just didn't really…

A couple notes: These rankings are based on the films themselves, not the fact that they won the award, or what the competition was that year. These are all rotten movies, as movies, and should be ashamed of themselves. (Especially Cimarron.) Secondly, and probably most importantly, this is pretty much a matter of…

Best Picture Rankings: Part One

I would argue, based purely on their merit as a movie, regardless of the BP competition, Crash was not the worst movie to win in the 2000s. (Controversial opinion, I know.)

It's coming, don't worry. (I wanna be cool!) It'll just be a separate post. I'm honestly having trouble figuring out the top of the rankings.

I have now seen every movie to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Generally, not a terrible group—I think there were only a few really lousy movies, and there were far more excellent movies than horrible ones.

Hulk was an odd movie—it kind of went from enjoying the "comic-ness" of it all, to being annoyed by it, to wishing it would end, to thinking it was kind of neat again, to really loving it again by the end.

Movies I saw in April, rankedish:

This has been Newswire for the Hard of Hearing.

I think I pretty much agree with all this. I think the ending was the best it could have been—she clearly wasn't going to leave, but it would have been a massive betrayal of the character to remain stagnant where she was, and the ultimate compromise really felt like classic Knope, in a good way. Yes, everything worked…

Not a series finale. But it sure felt like one. (And a good one!) Parks and Rec will return.

Series finales are tough—there's a fine line between melancholy and celebration that the best finales manage to hit, but many, many more fall into either maudlin over-sentimentality or tonal incoherence, throwing away years of character development for an idea that just didn't work. Recently, the How I Met Your Mother…