As one year-end list after another came rushing onto the sites of various publications, I found myself in a conversation with another Stranger veteran about the days when this paper refused to publish such articles.
Part of the reason was that lists were too obvious, and the idea that readers might have been trained to want such countdowns because other outlets ran them was another argument not to participate. But the real issue was that the very existence of The Stranger was predicated on celebrating a non-canon (or “alternative” as we used to be forced to call it) reality.
The idea that critics could throw a lasso around 10 or 20 or even 50 films and say this was what the past year meant seemed absurd—an industry/consumption/consensus-based model of cultural observation, borne out by how easy it is to predict Oscar nominations and how similar so many of these lists tend to be.