The entire balloting process is complete. It happened in three parts.
Part 1 was to ask for nominations. Because we are not looking for a list of the better scenes, but the one very best one, I only want to include those scenes which people would vote for as their one and only choice. Therefore, I listed seven sure-fire nominees
Alexandria Daddario in True Detective
Scarlett Johansson in Under the Skin
Eva Green in The Dreamers
Rosario Dawson in Trance
Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball
Heather Graham in Killing Me Softly
Gretchen Mol in The Notorious Bettie Page
I asked the blog readers to give me additional nominations for the very best scene of the millennium, understanding that we are looking only for one scene, so in order to be the best, it would have to beat those seven. About 20 people, either by blog comments or by e-mail, said “I would be willing to ignore those seven and choose _________ as my #1”
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Part 2 was to take those original seven performances plus the additional nominees and rank them from top to bottom on a “Baseball MVP” or “College Football Ranking” ballot. The results of that ballot are here.
Of the 25 women on that ballot, four received NO first place votes (Wiig, Parker, Mortimer, Linney). Five others received only a single vote (Jolie, Gyllenhaal, Clarke, Hayek and Wilde). They were dropped from the final competition – leaving only the sweet 16, the women that got multiple first-place votes in the preliminary round.
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Part 3 consisted of a “one-man-one-choice” ballot. The votes in the final run-off were closely clustered into four groups. There were vast gaps between the groups but not within them. The differences inside each group were so insignificant that, if the voting were repeated, any woman in the group might be the highest vote-getter in the group or the lowest, but would be unlikely to cross into a different group.
Group 1, Hall of Famers (130+ votes): Daddario and Green
Group 2, All-Stars (48-53 votes): Johansson, Holmes, Dawson
Group 3, Solid Contenders (19-28 votes): Berry, Robbie, Chastain, Graham, Silverman, Borth
Statistical anomalies:
1. Voters changed their minds about the Daddario/Green battle from the preliminary balloting to the finals. In the semi-finals, Daddario got 120 first-place votes, while Green got a mere 48. Because Daddario won the semis in a landslide, I did not expect the final balloting to be close, but it was, because Green’s gain from the semis to the finals was highly significant.
2. Margot Robbie and Michelle Borth also received improved second looks from voters in the finals. They barely qualified for the final round with a mere three and two first-place votes in the semis, but jumped all the way into the “solid contender” tier in the final voting. (Robbie soared all the way to seventh place!) Perhaps the visual aid, present in the finals but not in the semis, reminded people of what great scenes those were.
3. Of my original seven choices, five of them finished 1-2-3-4-6, prevented from a sweep of the top five spaces only because we all still love Katie Holmes after twenty years, which I did not foresee. On the other hand, Heather Graham’s scene was weaker than I anticipated (it finished in ninth place), and the voters did not at all share my enthusiasm for Gretchen Mol.
The actual numerical tallies follow:
Overall champion: Alexandra Daddario
Category champions:
Best scene 2000-2009:
1. Eva Green
2. Katie Holmes
3. Halle Berry
4. Heather Graham
Best scene 2010-2019:
1. Alexandra Daddario
2. Rosario Dawson
3. Scarlett Johansson
4. Margot Robbie
Best movie scene:
1. Eva Green
2. Rosario Dawson
3. Scarlett Johansson
4. Katie Holmes
Best scene from a series:
1. Alexandra Daddario
2. Michelle Borth
3. Kate Micucci
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