Best of 2020 thrown all out of whack

I greeted the news that the Oscars would be pushed back by two months with something of a shrug. They used to be at the very end of March, so having the ceremony in April would not be that big of a difference. We certainly would have well and truly moved on to the new year by then -- in a normal new year, which next year may not be, we'd already have a handful of "summer blockbusters" by the end of April -- but if they think it's necessary, well, so be it.

Until I realized the effect it was having on the end of the actual 2020 calendar year.

In tandem with the announcement, though making much smaller headlines, they announced that the eligibility period would extend until the end of February. That means that a January 13th 2021 release of some crap like Happy Deathy Day 3 is going to be eligible for a 2020 Oscar. Or does that mean the dreck like that will be pushed to the beginning of March instead?

Other than wreaking havoc on what we tend to think of as a movie year -- and that the best movie of 2020 could come out in 2021 -- it creates chaos for us film critics eager to release best of the year lists.

December is, of course, the traditional time to do that. On my blog, I wait until two or three weeks into January, as that is the cutoff I've set for myself, to let me catch up with movies that are getting a little bit of a later release, especially here in Australia.

That's not just an arbitrary deadline, though. My deadline for finalizing my list has always been the day the Oscar nominations are announced, which is usually sometime between January 10th and 20th.

This year, that date will be sometime in March ... mid-March, at the earliest, if movies that qualify are still being released at the end of February.

Will I keep my 2020 list open until mid-March before declaring my best of the year? Will critics accustomed to unveiling their choices during the holiday season, when they become part of the general flow of end-of-year festivities, similarly hold off until late February? Will they still get screeners by the end of the year, even if the movie isn't premiering until late February, allowing them to preserve the December release date for their lists? In which case, how out of sync will mine be with theirs? Or will they just exclude those movies from contention? Or hold them off until 2021?

You could get a scenario where a film wins best picture at the Oscars, and a particular critic ends up considering it their best film of 2021. That's just not right.

And what about the 2021 movie year? Does that year get shortened by two months? Or is there some kind of proportionate staggering backwards, with the following year's eligibility extended to the end of January 2022, until we finally return to a "normal" year?

Some of these answers are probably out there on the internet. But what was already going to be a weird movie year, in which most of us put a lot more stock than usual in a bunch of random Netflix movies, just got a lot weirder.

I know that how critics handle their end-of-year lists is just about our smallest and most luxurious concern at a time when the world is being torn apart by virus and social strife, and that the presidential election will be as much theater as anyone needs this year.

But it made me realize that something I thought was sacrosanct -- unveiling my best of the previous year in mid-January -- is also not free from the changes wrought by our crazy world.

If the baseball season beginning in late March/early April is not sacrosanct -- even though that's been happening for something like 150 straight years now -- then I suppose I shouldn't spend too much time worrying about whether you get to read my thoughts on the previous year in film at the same time you usually do.