A. 低俗小说 B. 冰血暴 C. 鐵面特警隊 D. 少女孕記 E. 天外奇蹟

Theoman is pretty good at picking movies: of the five he selected, three appear on this list.  Unfortunately, he is not very good at shuffling, for he didn’t manage to get any of them in the right order.  As for the others . . . A Few Good Men was very good, but I’ve never seen Unforgiven, so I refrained from judgment on that particular year.  And The King’s Speech was predictable but enjoyable, so I’m not sure you can say that Inception really bested it, unless you measure Best Pictures by multiplying the special effects budget by the number of plot holes (which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy it, but really, anyone who tells you they totally understood that movie is lying, including the director).

A Fan, of course, discovered a topic near and dear to his heart.  Perhaps too near, in fact, for it led him to start shouting out movies that no one besides him has ever heard of, like Quiz Show.  I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that it was actually better than Forrest Gump, as were all the other movies he put down, but I chose only one representative from “Oscar’s Annus Horribilis”: it’s Pulp Fiction, and unfortunately for A Fan, it came first.  It is unique among these movies in that the Chinese title is basically exactly the same as the English one (except, you know, that we have to write it with these funny symbols).

Then Another Fan came in, one unrelated to the first but sharing a lot of his passions and opinions, providing us with a wealth of Best Picture “better thans.”  This included at least one that I considered and rejected–Apollo 13, because it has a number in it–and two that I included.  So I guess Another Fan did better this week than A Fan.  He can brag about it if they ever happen to meet.  It seems that while A Fan felt that 1994 was the worst best picture year, Another Fan focused on 1997 as one in which every single other nominee was better than the winner.  Again, I only chose to use one, because L.A. Confidential was the hands-down winner that year . . . at least until James Cameron paid someone a billion dollars to make it not be.  You can find it at C, which appears to mean something like “iron-faced special police force” (keep in mind that I don’t actually speak Chinese, so my information is even less reliable than usual).

I suppose it’s always nice to know that one has at least two fans.

Another Fan’s other success came in picking Fargo, an uneven film, but come on!  The English Patient?  Guhhhh.  Fargo is B, and it has my favorite Chinese title: “Ice, Blood, Violence.”

And finally, in swooped Dragon, who really should have trusted her instincts, because I agree with her that Shakespeare in Love was better than Saving Private Ryan.  She also picked the wrong Pixar film: E is not Toy Story 3 but Up, which is both a better film and came in a year with a worse Best Picture winner (based on the logic that if The Hurt Locker was really so great, I would have seen it).

D is Juno, which I didn’t like on rewatching quite as much as I did the first time I saw it, but it is still leaps and bounds ahead of No Country for Old Men, which was a terrible, terrible, TERRIBLE film.  As a friend of mine once put it, “I didn’t think it was possible to make a movie about a homicidal maniac so boring.”

Okay, so now you’ve got the five films.  But let’s do something that involves a little less guesswork and a little more close examination of the characters (because that’s what we’re all best at, right?)  Find me the names of the directors of the five movies (as in, the five I specifically chose here) that should have–or at least could have–won it all.

NOTE: I replaced the director of L.A. Confidential with the director of Apollo 13, because there is no Chinese Wikipedia article on Curtis Hanson.  And, as we all know, if there’s no Wikipedia article, it doesn’t actually exist.

A. 科恩兄弟 B. 贾森雷特曼 C. 朗侯活

D. 昆汀塔伦蒂诺 E. 皮特多克特