Last time around I studiously broke down and explained each year's performance and the various factors behind why they placed where and blah blah blah who cares. Instead below is just a big overview, I'll cap it with some generic obsevations, and then we'll move right along.

So what can we make of this giant mess of data?

For starters: Year 10 is at the top still, to no one's surprise. It dropped a bit since 2017, but that's largely because of Black Dynamite's big fall. Year 10 went from being on 20 Top Films list in 2017 to only 13 this time around, though three of those were Phil's and for the most part its films went UP people's standings. It's also the only year that no individual attendee had in the negatives. So yeah, Year 10 still reigns supreme.

Interestingly, most of the newer years placed really high. The nightmare that was VirtualFest clocked in at 3rd place and would be there even without point scaling. Right behind it is Year 18 with the other Post-2017 years scattered in the upper half. Even Year 21, aka HurricaneFest, the second half of which was considered a nightmare, ultimately faired well in the results. I attribute this largely to us just having a better tolerance for crappy films as we've aged. A Divorce: Italian Style today wouldn't have the same resonance as it did to us twenty years ago. With the rise of more and more Indifferent votes instead of Dislikes, the newer years will only - one can assume - continue to trend towards the upper half.

Or perhaps it's all about The Man. With him contributing over half of the past five years' films, it could simply be that The Man - who generally provides palatable, acceptable films - avoided the big stinkers that draw other, crappier years into the gutter.

Year 13, which was the 2nd Worst Year in 2017, was the big loser this time around, suffering the biggest drop of any year and hitting the bottom spot. No clear reason why that I can see; it's just that while the other years had slight positive adjustments here and there, nothing about Year 13 appealed to us this time around.

Ultimately, ranking years is stupid and I only do it because it's funny. Year 7, the Third Worst Year, still had Elephant and Mysterious Skin. Year 5, the Second Worst Year, had Dangerous Lives and Pieces of April. So while it's a fun experiment and I've got the data to play around with, let's move away from this pointless discussion to an equally as pointless discussion:

Which attendee's films sucked the hardest?

Don't be fooled by that #1 spot: this was a horrible survey for Snobby.

Back in 2017, Snobhunter dominated the results with a massive 1.89 per-film average. That was more than double the second place person (The Man). Between here and now he's managed to shed nearly half of that and is poised to lose his top spot, which he's solidly held on to ever since we started scoring based on averages.

It's not hard to see why. Things aren't good when you have the #4 Overall Worst Film of All Time (Mandy, which was also the worst new film in the survey). Marriage Story was another post-2017 bomb, as was Wizard (-4.84). Normally when you have that many problem films, you need something to balance them out. Instead, Snobhunter's greatest hits suffered some big losses.

We've already talked about Drive's decline. It was was the #2 Overall Film back in 2017, giving Snobby both of the top spots. But it's even worse when you remember that other top film - Black Dynamite - lost the most points between now and 2017 of any positive-scoring film. It's still the #1 spot because it's fucking awesome, but that doesn't mean that drop didn't hurt.

Add to that the point shedding for former classics Virgin Suicides and Mysterious Skin and most of his bigger films really suffered in this survey. He added a handful of decent films over the past five years including Red Notice, Rad (3.51), Happy Death Day (3.14), and Jumani (1.69), but add them all up and they still don't offset that huge point loss from Mandy.

Still, Snobby is in that #1 spot because his good films are usually pretty darn good. He has the second-most positive points behind the monster that is The Man, but he did so with only 33 films. Alaay has 46 films but less positive points, and that, more than anything, shows why Snobhunter is still a force to be reckoned with.

Even so, one can only hope Snobhunter will totally ignore his children these next few years to help rebound his selection process, as he needs some fresh wind in his sails to set things right.

The little engine that could has come out of nowhere in 2022. Since the first survey in 2009, Elad has always languished in the middle of the pack, yet this time he's damn near taken over the #1 Proposer spot. If he could have boosted his average by only 0.04 pts, we'd be anointing a new MovieFest King. What, if anything, contributed to this sudden revival?

One big answer is, of course, Petite Maman. Elad only added two films over the past five years (the other being Space Jam: A New Legacy (0.82)), so Petite Maman's 7.66 pts really swung things in his favor. Like the Risk League of old, the survey is based on your average score, and so when you have as few films as Elad, one big film is all it takes to skyrocket that average.

Another, simpler factor is the loss of Phil's Top and Bottom Films. Last time around, Phil inexplicably put every Leprechaun film on his Bottom Films list, most of which were Elad's. So with all those negative points shrugged from his shoulder, Elad was bound to make a rebound.

The third factor was point scaling. Elad benefitted the most of any attendee from point scaling, so much so that it rose his average from 0.87 to 0.96. It's worth pointing out that none of the final placements would have changed without point scaling, but certainly Elad wouldn't have been quite as close to Snobhunter's adjusted 0.98 average. Most of that point scaling was Petite Manan, though there were a scattering of other picks which benefited with small boosts.

And of course the simplest answer is that Elad just doesn't have a big stinker. Time was when Lep Back 2 tha Hood and Weeping Camel dragged him down a bit, but it seems everyone has collectively forgotten to hate those films this time around, with the exception of Houdini. Houdini cast a Blorgo Ball against both of those films, and - fun fact - those two votes constitute all of the Blorgo Balls cast against Elad this survey. Combined this with a strong positive-to-negative-film ratio (17 positive to 10 negative) and you've got a recipe for success.

With the advent of a new selection process, hopefully this will keep Elad cranking out recommendations. Time will tell if they help or hurt his big 2022 upswing.

Houdini has always had a solid, upper-mid-tier showing, and 2022 is no exception. Part of this is just the law of numbers. With only 20 films to his name (the second fewest of any attendee), it doesn't take much to really swing that average one way or another.

Like Elad, Houdini only added two films these past five years: Sorry to Bother You (0.81) and Edge of Seventeen (5.46). Now if you asked Houdini he'd say he only added one and that Edge of Seventeen was randomly attributed to him by some Alaaian nonsense but... tough shit. Enjoy your five-and-a-half points, bozo.

And frankly, that's it. That's the entirety of his gains. Green Room had a nice 2 point jump with a couple new Top Film appearances, but its gains were offset by Snobhunter's renewed hatred for Lil' Pimp, meaning the boost to Houdini's average came entirely from a film that he maybe technically didn't even propose depending on your definition of the word "propose". Who's to say, really?

So what the hell happened to The Man? Before, he and Snobhunter were locked in an immortal stalemate for the good of all MovieFest. Now, he's bantha fodder.

Alright, that might be a bit much. With a disgusting 220.83 positive points to his name, The Man certainly is no slouch, and his Best Films above could stretch on and on if I let it. He has nine films in the Top 25, four of which are in the Top 10. And glancing at that small sample of his films above really doesn't make it clear why, specifically, The Man suffered so badly between 2017 and now.

The big issue is that The Man just has too many damn movies. We've seen with Houdini how you only need one big hit to shift your average drastically, so The Man - on the other end of the spectrum - has to deal with the "Death by a Thousand Cuts" problem. Even if he has a handful of huge movies with massive scores, if the rest of his films are middling or outright bad then it will offset all of his gains. In a game where volume can be a bad thing, The Man has volume to spare.

But the question remains: what went wrong here? It's not that he didn't have any hits over the past few years. Plus One was the Third Overall Best Film of All Time, with Everything Everywhere All At Once, Dave Made a Maze (7.28), VelociPastor (5.57), and Psycho Goreman (5.24) adding to his already impressive roster, and all but VelociPastor were the Best Film of their respective year. He added 57.14 positive points over the past five years compared to -47.04 negatives, which means he still had a positive ratio. When I initially saw The Man's final numbers I assumed it was because he just flooded us with mediocre films, and while yeah, these weren't exactly the best of his crop, that's not quite it either.

The problem is that he didn't keep up with his existing ratio. Put it another way: in 2017, The Man had 161.28 positive points, which is obviously impressive. Given that context, adding +50 points in five years seems amazing... until you factor in that he "only" had 67 films back then. He added nearly 50% of his total MovieFest proposals over these past five years, but because he didn't increase his positive-to-negative ratio at the same rate, his average naturally went down.

That wasn't his only problem. Additionally, The Man suffered from shifting Top and Bottom Films lists. Crank, Everybody Wants Some!!, Cube, and The Warriors had huge drops, and while a few of his other films helped make up that ground (Best Worst Movie, Tucker and Dale), there was a slight falloff across his massive volume of films that hurt the numbers on a lot of his Pre-2017 selections.

That's not to say he didn't have some stinkers. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (-8.29) was a huge bust with Knights of Badassdom (-4.79), My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea (-4.67), The Last Blockbuster (-4.30), and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (-3.66) eating into his gains. You might assume, based on his volume, that point scaling was an issue, but it turns out it was basically irrelevant where The Man was concerned. Without any point scaling, he would have 0.10 fewer points, meaning his average would have stayed at 0.65, having shifted down by only -0.00102331763146501.

Though of course that in itself is an issue. Five of the eight attendees benefited from point scaling, so if The Man didn't get the same boost that his competitors did then obviously he was "hurt" by the experiment.

Ultimately, I'm not too worried about The Man. I wouldn't be surprised if some of his older hits see a rebound next time around, whereas recency bias probably unfairly maligned films like Unbearable Weight. And besides, given The Man's unstoppable volume of films, it's not like he won't have a billion other selections to shift that average up or down. We just hope for his sake they aren't total utter garbage trash.

Also our sake. Please don't make them total utter garbage trash.

Those of you who remember the 2017 Survey might recall the ongoing storyline of The Fall of the House of Alaay, where result-after-result, year-after-year, our hapless narrator was slowly dragged into the negatives. And while he's still in the bottom half of proposers, the 2022 survey - and the films that came with it - were a huge boon to him.

Despite being the attendee with the second-most films to his name, Alaay only added four movies in the past five years: Portrait of a Lady on Fire, Palm Springs, Happiest Season (2.22), and Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (1.29). To those paying attention, that means his top two highest-rated films came since the last survey, were 50% of his contributions since 2017, AND came in the same year. So while Elad had a retrospective rebound from people positively re-evaluating a lot of his older picks, Alaay did it the old fashioned way: by adding good movies.

Outside of these films he actually LOST points with his Pre-2017 selections, though that was mostly the -2.03 drop from I'm a Cyborg But That's OK, his new Worst Film of All Time. Some of his other previous stinkers had some nice rebounds though, with Don't Be a Menace recovering 1.34 pts, All Hallows' Eve recovering 0.96, and The Star Wars Holiday Special recovering 1.51. Alaay fell off of a lot of Bottom Films lists, so that, combined with the massive success of Year 20, has pulled him out of the negatives and back to somewhere squarely in the middle of the pack.

Not surprisingly - given how important Portrait is to his final score - point scaling definitely helped Alaay more than others (though not as much as Elad). His average would only drop from 0.39 to 0.35 without it, but it's still a nice little boost.

Now of course it's not all good news, even if this was a big rebound. With 46 films to his name, Alaay somehow only has 17.95 points. Houdini, at only 20 films, has 15.40 (once again, you're welcome for Edge of Seventeen, buddy). If you factored out Year 20, Alaay would sink back into the negatives and his highest-placing film would be Let the Right One In at the #28 spot (which is only that high because he - and he alone - has consistently kept it on his Top Films list). Even with these new successes, having that few Big Name movies is not great for the guy with the second-most proposed films.

More than any other attendee, I suspect Alaay will be hit hardest our next time around. Unlike other proposers, Alaay's films don't tend to come-and-go on people's Top Films lists over the years, and instead once gone they stay gone for good (11:14, Princess Mononoke, Sad Movie, and PCU have done nothing but fade and fade with the years). Similarly, Palm Springs making the Top Ten feels like a fluke, and given that three of its Top Film appearances have it in the very last spot, I expect it to plummet in the next survey's rankings. Even with these successes, the analysis from last time stays consistent: Alaay is great at avoiding the bombs, has a small handful of good films to his credit, but is lacking in the "classics" department. We'll see what the next few years brings for the guy who over obsesses about these numbers way too much.

It's insane to me that Invisible Sister is someone's Second-Best Film, but here we are. TheBluePlayer, aka the man with the fewest films to his credit, actually added a ton of his films over the past few years. 6 of his 18 films came since 2017, so in many ways we're looking at totally new results where TBP is concerned.

And those results are - like usual - tepid. It's hard to call either Invisible Sister or Riptide a hit, much like it's hard to call either Morbius or Angus, Thongs, and Perfect Snogging a miss. In a game where a small volume of films can oscillate wildly, TBP managed a small uptick while still being locked in the negatives. Battle Royale, his only hit, had a decent revival, even if it's nowhere near the titan it used to be.

Ultimately, we still need more data to give TBP a proper analysis, and while he made big strides in upping those numbers, he'll need to wait another survey to get a clearer idea of his long-term trajectory.

He's out of the basement! For the first time ever, MMZ is no longer the attendee with the worst average! Sound the bells in the city square for this joyous day!

How did that happen, you ask? We'll actually cover a big factor in the Phil section below. Instead, let's look at what MMZ added since 2017.

He had five new films, which is impressive considering he missed 3.5 fests. And the good news for MMZ is that all but Buffalo '66 (-0.81) were in the positives: Samurai Cop 2, Shin Godzilla (2.98), Shortbus (2.58), and The Mystery of the Leaping Fish (1.25) constituted a 10+ point gain, and while that didn't pull him out of the negatives (he's got a long way to go), it did solidly distance him from that bottom spot.

Obviously the MagicMan still has an absolute murderer's row of suck, including the entire Bottom Three Worst Films of All Time. But at the same time, he's never not had the Bottom Three, so if you can't fix what's broken then at least you can improve on what works.

Normally I'd look at that -35 point deficit and think "no way he's clawing his way out of that one". But considering MMZ started with -77.15 in 2009 (and an insane -5.14 average), I'm beginning to believe. He just has to literally never stumble a single time.

There's one big, big reason Phil plummeted into the Worst Proposer spot, but we'll talk about the smaller stuff first.

Phil only added four films over the past five years, and you can see three of them up there. The fourth - Party Boat (-0.48) - is fairly irrelevant, but having two misses to one hit is certainly going to drag your score down. It also speaks to how tepid Phil's his are that Ingrid Goes West snuck in as his second best, considering it's the 52nd ranked film in the survey. Staten Island is doing a ton of work, and that's not good when it fell off every Top Films list it was on and plummeted from 6th place to 16th.

But none of that explains the real reason that Phil suffered so badly this year. The answer is - as you might be able to see in the big picture below that denotes the next section we'll talk about - bias.

As we do every year, I'll be breaking down people's self votes and all that fun stuff, but it's worth highlighting that because I obliterated Phil's Top and Bottom Films list, he lost a key opportunity to upvote his own films via his Top 17 Films list. Phil in particular was egregious with some of his picks, selecting weird things like Way of the Gun, The Big Hit, and Book of Love. 7 of his Top 15 from 2017 were his own films, and without those points to boost his score (and Blorgo Balls to cast at his opposition to lower their numbers), it's no wonder Phil fell so far.

Instead, the only thing I wonder is "would any among us do as well as we did if we didn't have our self votes to sustain us?" Well, my friends.... let's find out.