How ANDY makes its best-of-the-year lists

Cooper Long
Assistant ANDY Editor

One of the great mysteries of ANDY is our best-of-the-year list selection process. No more. In the interest of transparency, the formula is revealed here for the first time.

In order to keep up with the best of world cinema, our foreign correspondents attend many far-flung film festivals. We also take notes on countless films in the Silhouette screening room. While most theatres offer oversized cardboard soft drink cups, our private auditorium is equipped with graduated cylinders so we can catch our reviewers’ tears and quantify their emotional response.

ANDY is equally obsessive about tracking the year’s biggest and best albums. We don’t just sift through the endless stream of promotional copies that pour into the Silhouette office. When Kanye premiered the video for “New Slaves” by projecting it against a wall in Williamsburg, our reviewers were on an adjacent rooftop with a pair of binoculars. When Beyoncé abruptly dropped her latest album at midnight on Dec. 13, a lot of people stayed up late to listen. Our writers haven’t slept since her last record came out.

Once each writer’s best-of-the-year ballot is complete, they are sent in individual, sealed envelopes to the Silhouette’s auditor. The ballots, not the writers.

Just kidding. Obviously that story has more loopholes than the plot of Gravity. In reality, these rankings were decided over dinner at the Phoenix, using a napkin-based tabulation system. Like all best-of lists, our picks are hardly authoritative. These are some of the films and albums that affected our writers most in 2013. Feel free to agree, disagree or scribble your own napkin.