XWord Muggles Forum

Meta rules are that there are no rules. But this was surprisingly inelegant. I saw it, submitted it, and didn't really notice the inelegance until afterward.

Joe Ross wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 8:41 am I relearned, the hard way, to make a list of all BEST PICTURES (or fill-in-the-winner/nomination category) for film, stage, television, music, Nobel, etc.

My eidetic memory has been on the fritz for the last 6+ decades. I find no shame in interwebbing these things. Pity it takes me hours to realize this, sometimes.

Pfft, there were *only* 94 films to consider. In each category, that's 94 times 6, hm, carry the 4, that makes, oh, I don't know, about a BILLION movies. Lol/sob.

It's not really culturally current, given that it's almost 30 years old, but Marty played a key part in the plot of the movie Quiz Show as well...

Also, I see a lot of people mentioning different Oscar categories; doesn't 54-down point you only toward Best Picture winners? Keeping that clue in mind and seeing (O)LIVER in the grid kept me out of the rabbit holes. Oddly, given it's the only one of the fiv///four I've seen, Crash only occurred to me after consulting Wikipedia....

Jace54 wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 8:18 am From reading the comments, it appears that many have never seen Marty. I highly recommend it, great movie!

I agree! It's a wonderful film, in that romantic films of that time usually centered around attractive, socialite types falling for each other. One of the rare times a film featured a two "plain" people falling in love. Interesting tidbit, the actress Betsy Blair almost couldn't do the role because she had been blacklisted as a Marxist by the McCarthy goons. But since she was married to Gene Kelly, some strings were pulled and she got the part!

MikeM000 wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 9:32 am It's not really culturally current, given that it's almost 30 years old, but Marty played a key part in the plot of the movie Quiz Show as well...

Also, I see a lot of people mentioning different Oscar categories; doesn't 54-down point you only toward Best Picture winners? Keeping that clue in mind and seeing (O)LIVER in the grid kept me out of the rabbit holes. Oddly, given it's the only one of the fiv///four I've seen, Crash only occurred to me after consulting Wikipedia....

Only saw “Oliver!”, but was familiar with the names of the other films. The two “Crash”s and “Coda” were the first steps that I saw.

Is it just me, or did anyone else have “Consider Yourself” run through their head when they saw “Oliver!”?

Should have seen “Marty” and “Oliver” but didn’t. Not a “modern” movie fan. Didn’t solve but it’s all on me. Rule one on metas: there are no rules. That’s why I’m here.

My first rabbit hole, while it seemed a little on the nose, was to determine the editor of each of the movies mentioned in the "actor" of "movie" clues. When that didn't turn up anything obvious, I determined to match the first or last name of the editor to whichever was included in the clue. Which also led me to a list of unusable consonants and a dead end.

There were double letters both vertically and horizontally. I saw that, saw “edit” and went that way first. The vertical letters, in grid order, spelled CLONE. The horizontal were all jumbled. Ah, that must be the “edit” portion. Nope, not a chance.

I was also distracted by two consecutive clues for Moonlight. Why? When I received a clarifying nudge, I realized the right mechanism was one I had already discarded. Although the double entry for CRASH almost made me give up on that again. Then I thought about two clues for one movie being in the grid and I wondered if that was a clue or just a coincidence.

The two-word format of the long fills and only using one of them is a common meta mechanism. The clarification of Best Picture defined what to look for. To be honest, for 69A Cast members, in movie lingo had me wondering. My first thought was ACTORS. I never knew they were referred to differently for film. Another subtle hint?

After I got "actor" I noticed some other rabbit holes:

15A -Hall (Annie)
5D- Pat (ton)
36D - Ama (deus)
39D - Ben (Hur)


Found "atone" and "Blonde Venus" for two of the endings but nothing for the other two. This puzzle was jam packed with red herrings!

Keyed in on 54D immediately, so suspected it was limited to Best Picture winners. Spent a few minutes googling and being disappointed by discovering that various things didn't win BP (ATLANTIC City, BIG, Cold Mountain, etc.). Then I think COD-A popped up, and I knew CRASH and after that it fell quickly (the list of one-word BP winners is short), except obviously for being hung up on the CRASH dupe. But after being reassured by another solver that at least one other person was on the same shore I pulled the proverbial trigger.

Thought I had it when I saw that 12D GOO and 14A LIV were three-letter components of 53A GOOSE LIVER. Alas.

Only one of the academy-award-winning movies I'd heard of was Oliver!, so, absent a universal academy award title search, this weren't gonna happen in any case.

Thursday's only three days hence. Another chance to break my streak.

8^(

Here's our rabbit hole.

First, we thought that 71A (SEX) was a likely clue to the meta answer, as is often the case for the bottom right entry. Also, the clue for 71A is "Cause of an R rating."

Next, we were struck by the number of clues containing a person's name along with a movie name in quotations. Further, we thought sure that 43A followed by 45A each containing the same movie "Moonlight" was very unusual, and, therefore, a clue.

So, we looked up the movies with the above clue structure to see which ones had an "R rating."

That gave us:
33A Rambling Rose
38A Cold Mountain
43A Moonlight
45A Moonlight
68A The Boys From Brazil
2D Sleepy Hollow
39D Argo

Next, we went back to the grid to look at the first letter of each entry.

L A M A U R B

We "edited" two letters as suggested by the title which gave us L'AMOUR.

Bingo! The french word for "love" brought us full circle back to 71A.

ROMANCE is certainly a word related to movies!

I've never seen any of these movies, but I know that CRASH won Best Picture because when people were talking about Crash being such a great film, I kept thinking, that David Cronenberg movie about the people who -- ahem -- get a thrill out of car crashes?! (It was nominated for the Palm d'Or and it did win the Special Jury Prize at Cannes, though.)

Also, for anything movie-related, IMDB is your friend. Likewise, the Internet Speculative Fiction Database for science fiction/fantasy/horror, the Internet Broadway Database for Broadway shows and people, and for music, I like All Music.

Cindy N wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 1:00 am Although kind of confusing with using CRASH twice, I half expected something to be duplicated. Why else the consecutive MOONLIGHT clues if something else wasn't being duplicated. I was confused at first with CASH and RASH, but then thought about what he had done. Don't know if it was intentional or not.

I had a great rabbit hole story to submit, but since I solved I shall leave that to someone who missed out on a chance for the other mug.

I think the adjacent Moonlight clues and the adjacent "Verdi Offerings" were deliberate hints that there'd be to CRASH manipulations.

hoover wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 11:26 am Also, for anything movie-related, IMDB is your friend. Likewise, the Internet Speculative Fiction Database for science fiction/fantasy/horror, the Internet Broadway Database for Broadway shows and people, and for music, I like All Music.

:::bookmarking::: Many thanks!

IMDB has been a personal resource since its inception.

Is Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon still a thing? I never played, but admired those who could rattle off connections.

MikeM000 wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 9:32 am It's not really culturally current, given that it's almost 30 years old, but Marty played a key part in the plot of the movie Quiz Show as well...

Also, I see a lot of people mentioning different Oscar categories; doesn't 54-down point you only toward Best Picture winners? Keeping that clue in mind and seeing (O)LIVER in the grid kept me out of the rabbit holes. Oddly, given it's the only one of the fiv///four I've seen, Crash only occurred to me after consulting Wikipedia....

Quiz Show is one of my all time favorites. After my first viewing of Quiz Show, I had to watch Marty.

femullen wrote: Mon Mar 06, 2023 10:39 am ..., so, absent a universal academy award title search, this weren't gonna happen in any case....

Um, why on earth wouldn't a universal academy award title occur?

Because the movie clues were too many and inconsistent in form I figured they were irrelevant and as the five themers were long and weird they were so very typical meta themer looking (especially as they *didn't* have anything to do with movies) and the clue about best pictures made me figure it was about best picture titles.

SO I did a search for the 94 best picture titles. Why wouldn't I? First one I saw was CODA and that was that.

Of all my early bails, this one gets the

Definitely gettable (even though I didn't). It's interesting the patterns of misses one sees in one's own solving repetoire. For me if there are too many possible metanisms, I find it hard to narrow down and focus. Plus when there are true theme answers that are NOT obvious (which I categorize these) I find it hard to vest enough time to crack the code. I guess in retrospect, there were four (+ 1) VERY long answers. But for me they didn't scream "We are themers". Also I saw 8 clues with the format NAME in "MOVIE TITLE" and thought that a more fertile ground.

End of day I don't think it was unfair. And the double Crash, while annoying, had to be obvious if you got: ACTO + ?

To the topic of whether there was another Oscar category to examine... there is an Oscar for film editing, and almost every film listed in the clues was either a winner or a nominee for film editing. I went and looked up all of them.

Just to add to your rabbit hole collection.