A META LIST OF LISTS
The Best Of “Best Of” Lists In 2011: Music, Movies, Memes, Cat Names & More
TIME TO RESET THE CALENDAR, LOOK BACK for an accounting and look forward with new plans. Happy New Year, folks. Enjoy banging your pots and pans or watching the ball drop or tearing one on, or however you choose to spend the eve of 2012.
Before turning the page, journalists typically spend the last few days of each year compiling lists of their favorite movies, moments, memes, heroes, headlines of the year. Thanks to them, and to the wonder of the Internet, here are the best ”best of” lists compiled in one concise list. And don’t take ‘best’ too seriously: these lists typically reflect one person’s opinion or, for me, what’s most appealing after Google spits up its offerings. Still, these lists are always a great starting point if you’re looking for media to consume: let someone else do the culling. Happy reviewing.
Best Movie Lists:
Miami Herald’s best of movie list includes Moneyball, The Tree of Life and Drive.
Roger Ebert’s picks for the year.
CNN’s compilation also includes their picks for year’s worst.
IMDB, Internet hot spot for videophiles, includes 29 movie titles. Topping the list is Melancholia.
Time’s Mary Pols’ picks for best, as opposed to Richard Corliss’ list.
CinemaBlend’s best-of list is topped by Drive, driven by the Internet’s “it” actor Ryan Gosling.
And for the icing on this slice of pop, MSNBC has a piece on the funniest movie lines of 2011.
Best Album Lists:
The Daily Beat’s best of album collection is topped by The Weeknd’sHouse of Balloons and closes with James Blake’s eponymously-titled album.
The Long Island Press compiles its 50 best albums of the year, giving you a night long’s exploration if you’ve got no other plans for the night.
The Guardian’s best of list was compiled by readers.
NME — which dubs itself the ‘first for music news’ — gives us the year’s 50 best according to its audiophiles.
MTV’s Matt Pinfield shares his top five, which includes “Philly troubador” Kurt Vile’s Smoke Ring For My Halo.
MTV also lists its top five Hip Hop albums.
Best Books Lists:
Publishers Weekly lists its picks for best books of the year, but also compiles titles for specific genres including Fiction, Mystery, SF/ Fantasy/ Horror, Nonfiction, Children’s Picture Book, Children’s Fiction and more.
Kingmaker New York Times‘ best of for 2011 is topped by Chad Harbach’s The Art Of Fielding. But for a broader list check out its list of 100 notable books of the year.
Canada’s National Post has the most unique best of book list I came across: best beer brew books. Check it out here.
Salon.com lists its five best fiction novels of the year, topped by the much-heralded The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides.
The Wall Street Journal cleverly packages its “best of” list of books as “twelves months of reading.” Works for me.
Best Photos:
BuzzFeed’s Matt Stopera compiled the ‘most powerful images of 2011″ which captured the site its largest number of hits ever. See what all the fuss was here. BuzzFeed also serves up the year’sbest panda photos as well as best shots from “poultry clubs”, which rightfully belongs in the next category.
HuffPo gives us the year’s best photos of Chicago, and because I’m in Chicago, I’m delivering the link here to you.
Quirk & Ephemera:
MTV compiles the year’s best cries. You just know Snooki’s on the list.
MTV also delivers us thethe geek’s 10 best toys.
Time served up its 50 best websites of the year. Here’s what I want to know: When Is CrabbyGolightly going to hit it?
Who is better to deliver us a ‘best meme’ list for the year than KnowYourMeme.com? Knowing what’s on this list (Rebecca Black, planking, Nyan Cat) will give you instance cred with your 16-year-old.
NPR serves up its nominations for 10 best news memes, including my favorite, the pepper-spraying Oakland cop whose psychopathic tendencies were on display during the University of California’s Occupy protest.
BuzzFeed compiles its list of 50 funniest headlines. An example: ‘Man known to lie in road is run over and killed.’ If they come up with 315 more they’ll be able to publish a geeky desk calendar for working stiffs.
Geek hangout Mashable also lists its favorite memes of the year here.
Ariana Huffington’s AOL-HuffPo thoughtfully delivers us the best celebrity bodies of the year. The list has some unusual names and picks.
HuffPo also gives us 2011’s “most criminally overlooked books”, and “top cat names,” (Hello, Sammy!), both efforts I can get behind.
And just for beliebers, Sugarscape treats us to the year’s top 10 Justin Bieber/Selena Gomez moments.
AOL also produced a special package of “11 Days That Shaped 2011, spotlighting the biggest headlines of the year including Osama Bin Laden’s killing, Amy Winehouse’s death, Charlie Sheen’s meltdown and more.
Gawker names its 10 most “heroic characters of the year Note to Gawker readers: keep your tongues in cheek.
TechRadar gives us a list of the
year’s 200 best iPad apps. Time compiles the 50 best apps for the iPhone, topped by Angry Birds, while Rolling Stone lists its favorite music apps here.
Have a best of list to share? Leave it in comments. And enjoy one of the most ridiculous memes of the year. Happy 2012.
