Happy New Year!

2010 doesn't kick into gear until January 1 in the real world, but it's first day of Year 1 at Best Pictures of the Year and it's a happy occasion, indeed.  Delineated on specific annual terms, BPotY looks forward to creating a yearbook that chronicles each annual collective as the sum of its cinematic parts.  The films of current and future years will always be related to those of the past, reflected across the time continuum to reveal essential cinematic trends that differentiate cinema from every other art, parallel insights that collectively forge the treacherous gap between art and commerce.  Year after year, as audiences alternately ignore (Richard Kelly's "The Box" is 2009's latest arty flop) and embrace (Kelly's debut "Donnie Darko" was ignored in its brief theatrical go, discovered on DVD by smart fans) movies that truly deserve to be seen by an invested audience, they're showing up in predictable masses to see the latest robots vs. aliens spectacle, or worse (unfathomable success for "Alvin and the Chipmunks" made the "Squeakuel" inevitable). 

These patterns of divergence in both quality and quantity didn't begin with movies; comparative literature employs historical framework to illuminate the invisible fabric of the art form through time.  So begins The Best Pictures of the Year, with scholarly earnest and an eye of the calendar. Fireworks!