With Iron Man 3 opening to $175 million over the weekend, the summer movie season has officially begun (officially according to me). Around these parts, we like to handicap the winners like Jeff Gillooly in our Fantasy Summer Box Office game. But there’s no reason for you to sit on the sidelines like a casual duh-bserver, writing a summer movie is easy! And today, Justin Halpern, the best-selling author of I Suck at Girls and Shit My Dad Says, is going to tell you how.

Every summer, the exact same types of movies come out.  So in the interest of helping you all become super successful screenwriters and directors, I decided to go ahead and break down the four types of summer movies, so that you can go ahead and make your own.

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If you are an Academy Award nominee this year, I would like to offer you first my congratulations, and second, some words of consolation. Chances are you are going to lose. The likelihood of losing is usually 75% or higher depending upon the number of other nominees in your category. Since it is more than likely that you will not win an Academy Award, you should take some time to understand what you’ll be missing out on. Because really, it’s less than you think.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was initially conceived by ruthless Hollywood tycoon Louis B. Mayer, a man who is remembered for, among other things, using blackmail to get a discount on Clark Gable’s salary. The intended purpose of the Academy was to declaw the growing labor movement of Hollywood talent and technicians. The approach was twofold: first, to create a pseudo-union that would arbitrate contracts between studios and talent (always in favor of the studios, of course), and second, to bestow awards.

“I found that the best way to handle [moviemakers] was to hang medals all over them … If I got them cups and awards they’d kill themselves to produce what I wanted. That’s why the Academy Award was created,” Louis Mayer once remarked.

Since then, getting an Oscar has become one of the chief goals for anyone working in film. Mayer’s scheme worked. But the fact remains that the awards are figuratively hollow, which is something you should really take to heart in case you are hoping to get one.

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Oscar voters are out of touch, milquetoast, hopelessly middlebrow, and so old that they couldn’t even figure out how to e-vote, but it’s always been this way, and we still argue about it anyway. Even after Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction, The English Patient over Fargo, Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan, etc. The list goes on, and we should know better. In 2013, no one should be surprised that the Academy’s choices are two parts wrong and ten parts boring, but if we’re going to bitch somewhere, it might as well be here. I may be a lot of things, but allergic to money isn’t one of them. And hey, as bad as the Oscars are, they’re still a thousand times better than the Grammys and the Emmys put together. So here they are, the best and worst of this year’s Oscar nominations. KNIVES OUT, SHITHEADS! IT’S TIME TO END SOME FRIENDSHIPS!

(FYI, you can find my reviews and best-of list and Burnsy’s Worst list at these links. The full list of nominations is at the bottom below).

BEST PICTURE:

Best:
Django Unchained. After getting snubbed at the DGAs and WGAs, it’s nice to see Tarantino’s latest get some love from the Academy, even though the very things that make me love it instead of just like it – that it’s so gleefully vulgar and deliberately lowbrow – are the same reasons it won’t win and didn’t receive more nominations.

Worst:
Beasts of the Southern Wild, Les Misérables. I’ve already gone over in great detail why Beasts isn’t a great movie.  Even in terms of movies that appeal hard to pedantic white liberal fantasies, Life of Pi did it better, and in a much nicer way (not to mention, it had a carnivorous island full of meerkats).

Les Mis is just… God, it’s so predictable. You had the choice of nominating less than 10 (you’ll notice there are only nine nominees this year – here’s a refresher course on why), and Les Mis still made the list? I think of it like this: There are times in my life when I’ll be riding my fixed gear down to my local San Fran latte shop listening to This American Life on my iPhone; and other times when I’ll be eating chicken wings with my bros while we watch football and trash talk each other’s fantasy teams down at the sports bar. In both instances, I’ll think to myself, “God, I feel like such a stereotype right now,” and try to change something up. Oscar voters… never seem to have that thought. “A movie full of famous actors with dirty faces singing French songs about poverty and trying to f*ck each other? Oh hell yeah, more of that plz.” Les Mis would be insulting to Academy voters if they weren’t so dumb. Les Mis can derelicte my balls, capitan.

Snubbed:
No Magic Mike? Are you kidding me? But I’m not surprised. It was inevitable that the Academy voters would only see the guy pumping up his blurry dick in the foreground, and not the nuanced, melancholy story about trying to find a place in the modern economy that those blurry dicks were framing. Looper? The Master? Again, not surprised, but the fact that Les Mis got in but not the best original sci-fi in years and Joaquin Phoenix’s most watchable performance isn’t going to go unmentioned here.

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Inviting someone over to watch a movie with you is pretty much universal code for “let’s have sex, but pretend that was not the intention for tonight so we don’t feel so morally perverse.” Now, some of you might not put a lot of thought into the movie you’re going to play for you and your date, but I am here to tell you that it matters. The film you choose is very important in setting the mood, and in many cases is also a valid expression of who you are, and what kind of lover you will be. Through much trial and error I have figured out the perfect films to play before the long long night of lovemaking.

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The Sundance Film Festival, Hollywood’s premiere celebration of Hollywood insiders celebrating the outsider, recently released their programming schedule, and with the 2013 fest just a few weeks away, Laremy Legel and I decided to attempt to explore just what makes a good Sundance movie. Is it scarves? Non-linear narratives? Magical realism? Melancholic, semi-autobiographical tales of romanticized bohemian narrators trying to find their place in an increasingly alienating world with the help of a manic pixie girls? Is it, as David Sedaris once wrote of hanging out with filmmakers in college, “grainy black-and-white movies in which ponderous, turtlenecked men slogged the stony beaches, cursing the gulls for their ability to fly”?

Laremy and I are a lot like the Supreme Court in that we may not be able to tell you exactly what makes a Sundance movie, we just know one when we see one. While we most likely won’t be making the trip ourselves this year (trivia: we met there two years ago), that doesn’t mean we can’t still drool over the program guide like a pair of old yuppies reading a Zagat’s Guide, and then make wild generalizations as to its content.

Here, using the actual program guide, we tried to rank the Sundanciest Sundance Films in terms of Sundanciness (a very scientific measure, though we didn’t include all of them), as only people who would quote David Sedaris in an article about it could do. And if you’re attending the festival this year, we helpfully included some pairings to help you get the most out of each. Boner Appetite!

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