Don’t you hate it when you go to a baseball game where your team is winning 11-0 and the instant you show up the other team starts a comeback to tie the game at 11? If you can answer yes to this question, you must be Billy Beane. The Oakland A’s GM was marginally fictionalized for Moneyball the movie, but the story itself is true. Beane never attends his team’s games. A former player himself, he is unable to watch impotently as his acquisitions compete. Our third place finisher for Best Scene recounts the climactic 20th game of an unprecedented (for baseball) 20 game winning streak. Knowing that his team is way ahead and that this win is a piece of baseball history, Beane turns his car around and heads to the stadium. The team immediately falls apart, which causes Tim Hudson, a pitcher who had never lost a game in which he had a five run lead up until that point, to blow it. Beane helplessly witnesses the meltdown as the movie makes the unusual but powerful decision to drown out all audio to enhance the weight of the visual. It is a brilliant piece of filmmaking made all the better because it is based in real life events. And Brad Pitt may never have a better moment as an actor than he does in this scene.

The Artist shows up in just about every category of The Calvins this year (I don’t think it’s in Best Videogame but I could see that happening). Its fourth place selection for Best Scene is the moment in which all of the heartbreak and suffering from earlier in the movie is cast aside. All that is left is for two people who clearly love one another to dance the night away. As we learn early in the movie, George Valentin is quite the hoofer, a mimic capable of repeating any step he sees. While the adjustment from silent movies to talkies may have left him behind for a time, the idea for a new kind of feature, a musical, proves to be his salvation. He confidently takes the hand of the woman with whom he has been smitten since their first encounter and together they revolutionize their industry. The Artist is a movie that brims with optimism at the start, takes a darker turn and then finishes in the sunniest manner possible in the end. It is this final celebration that left BOP staff members with a smile on our faces as we exited the theater. The dance scene is pure Hollywood in the best way possible, an apt resolution for a love letter to the glory days of the industry.

A pair of scenes from the raucous comedy Bridesmaids split the vote enough that they only wind up in fifth and sixth position. Our staff evenly split on which is the funnier moment between a series of improvised attempts to earn forgiveness from a crush and a fair amount of gastric distress that strikes at the least appropriate time in a bride’s early preparations. If there had been a consensus for either scene, that segment would have challenged for victory in the category. Instead, Bridesmaids earns two nominations in the top six. In our defense, it is all but impossible to choose between a desperate woman’s attempts to attain the attention of the man she has wronged and a few moments wherein cheap Brazilian food leads to bowel moves that erupt “like lava." Bridesmaids is arguably the funniest film of the year and these are the two centerpiece segments from it.

The other split vote this year comes from the same film that wins the category, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2. While more members of our staff favor the final showdown, there was a schism as others championed the flashback sequence that reveals the life and fate of the inscrutable Severus Snape. For a series of eight movies, viewers have been left in the dark about whether he is truly redeemed or in fact a sick twist who enjoys humiliating impressionable children. The reveal of the causality for his actions is a painfully beautiful exploration of what happens when love at first sight is also love unrequited. We relish the emotional resonance of this moment and name it the seventh best scene of the year.

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