Todd Chandler

Two years ago, I decided to up my view­ing of the Oscars from pure spec­ta­tor sport to active pre­dic­tor and vocal com­men­ta­tor. Not that I have any­thing worth say­ing, but I get a lot more out of the event by putting in my two cents. To do this meant I needed to see as many of the nom­i­nated movies as possible.

The process I used the last two years was to take Enter­tain­ment Weekly’s 25 Must See Movies before the Oscars list and work my way through it before Oscar night. I briefly recapped each movie and kept a run­ning rank­ing of which movies I liked best.

I like to share the list with friends, because I found I learn more about the movies by hear­ing how oth­ers like and rank them dif­fer­ently than me. In short, the process added value to my Oscar view­ing experience.

This year, I waited until the nom­i­na­tions came out to focus my efforts a lit­tle more. The obvi­ous place to start was with the movies nom­i­nated for best pic­ture — this year there are nine. Then I added movies for Best Actress — The Help was the only dupli­cate in the Best Pic­ture cat­e­gory so that added another 4 movies. Then Best Actor which added 2 movies to the list. Sup­port­ing actress added Brides­maids to the list, and sup­port­ing actor added Begin­ners and War­rior. That brought the total to 18 movies.

Of those, I’ve only seen 4: Begin­ners, Brides­maids, The Descen­dants, and Mid­night in Paris. So I have four weeks to see 14 movies and rank them as I go. Wish me luck!

Now, here’s where you come in. I’d love for you to join me on this jour­ney. Share your list of movies to see, tell me how you would rank the movies, react to my rank­ings and tell me where you think I got it wrong. If you don’t see all the movies, no wor­ries, com­ment on what you have seen. And then on Oscar Night, let’s tweet and Face­book to cheer and moan together. I look for­ward to learn­ing what you think about the best movies of 2011 over the next four weeks.