MEMORIZING
I couldn’t sleep one night, so I decided to begin to memorize the Best Picture Academy Award Winners from the start of the awards in 1928 to the present. I memorized the year that the movie was released, which to me seems more important than the year (the calendar year following the year it was made) the award ceremony took place. That night I got to 1975 (One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest), because mnemonic pictures were so easy to create for these movies, especially ones that I was familiar with.
More on my method…
This was the first time I used my PERSON=YEAR method. I have used this method since then to always denote the year using my PERSON. I have found this to be a good method because
1. My people are super memorable to me and each time I see one, I know the year.
2. When I want to add additional number information–in this case the number of the award show (for instance, 2019 was the 92nd Academy Awards ceremony)–I used the OBJECT from my PAO to differentiate from the year.
I thought it would be neat to start the memory palace in my town at a specific place to match up the 1931 winner, Cimarron, with a street in my town of the same name. My plan was to go through town on a route that would end at our local movie theater. Anyone that knows me, knows that I have no sense of direction, so I think this is why I was only to 1970 (Patton) at the movie theater door. So, I revised my plan to make 100 locations (thinking ahead to the 100th annual Academy Awards!) that looped around town, back to my starting point.
At the time I memorized these movies (January 2020), I was working at the library. I was working in Media Services, where there was a lot of downtime. I figured, since I was helping people find movies, it would be OK to work on this little project of mine… I plotted all the locations into a google map and titled each pin with the year of the movie, my major system person denoting the year, and the title of the movie. If you click on the pin itself, there are added notes with my mnemonics. God, I’m a loser. But I’m sharing it here anyway:
Unfortunately, Google maps won’t embed above, so here is the pdf to view here or download:
Oscar Best Picture Printable Checklist
Here is a pdf checklist I made that you can print, fold, and use to track the Best Picture winners that you have already seen and can easily see those that you still need to catch!
If you’ve never folded a mini book out of a sheet of paper, you can find the instructions here, or just follow this diagram from the good people at https://pocketmod.com/
You’ll end up with this:
