You may not be the only one at your Oscar party tonight pretending to have seen all nine Best Picture nominees: 2011 moviegoing attendance was the lowest in 15 years.
The year-end listicle is a stressful affair. It's important: You are defining a moment in history. It's hard: You have to remember stuff that happened twelve whole months ago, which is multiple millennia in internet years. Finally, it has a strict deadline: If you procrastinate, then the work you've done will be rendered completely irrelevant at the stroke of midnight on January 1st.
Lies: They travel halfway round the world before the truth gets its boots on. If you don't tell them, you never have to remember anything. Ask me no questions and I won't tell you any. The year that now comes to an end was, like all years, riddled with them. Grand lies and small ones, grave ones and frivolous ones, true ones and false ones—check that. They were all false. Here is a list of some of them that really caught my attention.
2011 was a great year for instafame. With cameras and Twitter users providing blanket coverage of each big news story, the whole world became a potential micro-celebrity. Let's take some time to remember 2011's best flash-in-the-pan celebrities, and then forget about them, forever.
2011 offered us an amazing array of viral videos, ephemeral clips whose popularity was sometimes born out of mockery, sometimes out of amazement, and sometimes out of humor. Whether it was a woman falling into a fountain, an incredible time lapse piece, or the inescapable Rebecca Black, all of them found a way to draw millions of eyes. Here are some of the videos that kept the web spinning this year.
We loathe a lot of people here at Gawker, mostly because we recognize that humanity is irreversibly doomed and the future holds nothing but Kim Kardashian dancing in six-inch stilettos on the graves of the poor. (Silver lining: Well-aerated grave grass.)
Many were loathed in 2011; these are the ones we call our own. This is not a list of the world's most loathsome characters. This is (with apologies to the NY Press) a list of Gawker's most loathsome characters. Learn them. Love them. Loathe them.
This year, television gave us some incredible moments, from Charlie Sheen's on-camera meltdown to Oprah and Regis stepping off the stage to, the year offered plenty of highlights and lowlights. This compilation video brings them everything together: the hilarious residents of Pawnee, Indiana and the half-faced drug kingpins of Albuquerque, New Mexico, Christine O'Donnell walking off Piers Morgan's show and Louis CK sucking up to Dane Cook. If you weren't watching enough TV this year, here are all the moments people were talking about and all the spoilers you were warned about (including a NSFW clip near the end).
2011 has been quite a year, and there has been lots of news, scoops, leaks, exclusives, scandals, internet explosions, sexts, and one very very famous dead guy. So, here are the most-read posts on Gawker for the entire year—take a moment to remember what passed.
An enterprising fella named Bill Lucey took it upon himself to ask a bunch of prominent news organizations what their most highly-trafficked news story of the year was, on their websites. The results may surprise you! But we doubt it. Highlights:
Over the weekend the city of Chico, California hosted the U.S. National Yo-Yo Championships, just like it does every year, and there were winners! Nimble, lightning-fast winners, most of whom were male. In fact, only one woman competed in this year's contest: 19-year-old Ann Connolly, who won the "Best Girl Player" award. WTF, ladies? Stop having babies and get cracking on your Rock the Babies. Stop sleeping and start practicing your Reverse Sleepers. Let's estrogenize that thing next year.
The new year has arrived and it is awful, what with bird/fish/crab death, floods, freezing temperatures, and zombie ex-Vice Presidents. So let's just put it all out there and list the reasons why this is already the worst year ever.
[A man performs what could be a Triple Lindy off the 59-foot high Cavour Bridge in Rome, Italy this morning. Image via AP]
We're all well aware of William Shatner's love for performing pop hits in a goofy spoken word style, his "Rocket Man" is legend. Here's his performance of "It was a Very Good Year" from the Mike Douglas Show in 1969.
It's New Year's Eve, a moment to reflect on the year that's gone by and to make some (sure-to-be-unfulfilled) promises about the one about to arrive. As part of that renewal, here's a tiny bird hatching in someone's hand.
