Word: popularizers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Recently, though, the list has got pretty samey. Among this year's top five were two popular films, the winning Slumdog Millionaire and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, buttressed by three strenuously worthy films - Frost/Nixon, Milk and The Reader - that appealed to the political preoccupations (Watergate, gays and the Holocaust) of the Academy's venerable membership, and which almost nobody else cared...
...critic in me would like to see Best Picture nominations for foreign-language films and documentaries. But the Academy-board poobahs aren't trying to make room for more gnarly little art-house entries. They know that more people watch the Oscars in years when truly popular movies are among the finalists. The biggest ratings in the past 15 years have been when Titanic and LOTR: The Return of the King swept to victory. Ratings were up a bit this year; but if two big audience favorites, Slumdog and The Dark Knight, had gone head to head, the numbers might...
...popular as bariatric surgery has become - each year, more than 200,000 people undergo stomach-shrinking procedures in an effort to lose weight - the reality is that there is still little information about which patients should be getting the surgeries or how effective they really are as a treatment for obesity...
...Sanford, in fact, has always been more effective as a conservative icon than as a conservative governor, a figure popular with the Republican Party's red-meat base but in chronic conflict with South Carolina's GOP-controlled legislature. When TIME ranked him in 2005 as one of the nation's worst state chief executives, it was because his fiscal hard-liner theatrics (carrying piglets under each arm to the door of the state legislature to protest pork-barrel spending) rarely yielded real results. In too many instances, his conservative principles thwarted the economic development of a poor Southern state...
Often you distinguish between the people who are best remembered - maybe because they were the exceptions, the most creative - and the people who were the most popular at the time. What appealed to you about that approach? I suppose it's a way of [avoiding] the great man or woman theory of history and [instead] looking at what was the norm. It's important to distinguish between what we like and what was important to people listening to music in the moment. When you think about the French paintings in the late 19th century, we all think about Impressionism...