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    That's So '90s

    Posted Wednesday, April 01, 2009 3:28 PM | By Willa Paskin
    In honor of college basketball's March Madness, Best Week Ever is running a supremely satisfying ‘90s Movie Madness competition, in which 64 movies, seeded and in brackets, face off against one another so users can vote to determine which is the most quintessentially ‘90s. If that sounds complicated, it boils down to this: Which is more ‘90s, Reality Bites or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Clueless or Showgirls? Billy Madison or Silence of The Lambs? Friday or Point Break? You know you have an opinion.

    The brilliance of the Best Week Ever contest lies in both the accuracy of the seedings, i.e. the rank BWE assigned to the various ‘90s films (For example, Clueless, Billy Madison, Encino Man, and American Pie are the No. 1 seeds), and the unerring understanding of '90s-ness voters possess. (For example, in the third round of play, Encino Man fell to No. 8 seed She's All That, because, well, it obviously deserved to.) Voters' uncanny comprehension of what makes House Party so much more ‘90s than Varsity Blues buoys my spirits: We Americans may not agree on much, but at least a certain segment of the blog-reading population, well-versed in middling cinema, intuitively understands that flat tops mattered more to the decade than James Van Der Beek. This is a good sign.

    As with trivia contests, this competition takes useless knowledge—real familiarity with scores of mostly lame movies—and makes it momentarily valuable: It really is good I’ve seen Half Baked, if only so I know for sure that Singles is that much more '90s than it. Movie Madness also instructs us on how to watch the real March Madness: To enjoy a sporting event, you have to pick a side. It can be for the silliest reason-a guy on one team is wearing sports goggles. Aww—but if you don't have a dog in the race, the race is really, really boring. If you can care as much about Michigan State winning as Clueless, this weekend's Final Four just might be fun. If you can't, rent Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead instead, because it's definitely been a long time since you've seen that one, and, lord, it is really '90s.
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