🏆 The State of the Race: Mega Death Race is Live
With the addition of the BAFTA nominations, the Mega Death Race (the triple threat of Oscars, BAFTAs, and Spirits) has officially started.
The Totals: 114 films and over 178 hours of content.
The Leaderboard: While no one has crossed the finish line yet, 3 users are currently tied with only 2 films left to go!
The Spirits and Shorts Struggle: We know some of the Independent Spirit and BAFTA short films nominations are currently tricky to track down. Hang in there - accessibility usually improves as we get closer to the ceremonies.
Meanwhile, the Mecha (206 films) and Mecha+ (221 films) races are also nearing completion. If you’re looking for more to add to your ballot, the AoDR Deathies nominations are expected on February 15th. Check out the Reddit announcement to see how you can get involved.
📈 100,000 Films and Counting
We are on the verge of hitting 100,000 films logged on DeathRaceTracking.com. Seeing the site support so many of your races is exactly why I built this. Thank you for making this community what it is!
📽️ A Reminder: The Animation Showcase
We are incredibly lucky to have access to The Animation Showcase streaming platform. A huge thank you again to Benoit and Hugo for making this possible for our community.
A serious note: Please ensure you are complying with their Terms of Service. Do not share access or misuse the platform. They monitor usage closely, and we want to remain in their good graces so we can keep providing this amazing resource to the community. You can find registration details here.
🛠️ Site Updates & New Features
I’ve been busy under the hood this week. Based on your feedback, here are the latest improvements:
Letterboxd Importer (Beta): Improvements to both RSS and Zip imports. Subscribers should be able import up to 50 films per run more quickly and more accurately than before - I’d love your feedback and real world experiences as I try to make this as useful as possible.
Rating Visibility: Don't want spoilers or bias? You can now hide ratings on film cards (for unwatched films or all films) via Profile Settings. Thanks, Broofa!
Persistent Filters: Set your filters once and they’ll stick across all races until you reset them. Thanks, MoeSzys!
Account Deletion: Your data privacy matters to me, and even though I hope you’ll never want to use it, you can now delete your account and all associated data in just a couple of clicks via the Profile menu. This removes all your data from the site - you won’t be on leaderboards, your ratings and watched list will be fully and quickly removed, so please only use this if you really want to delete your account.
Time Zone Logging: Tweaks made to ensure your watch history reflects your actual time zone more accurately.
Friends Leaderboard: Following last week’s introduction of Friends races, a few tweaks have happened to improve the way this happens behind the scenes. As well as these 1-to-1 races, I’m working on a new feature of public and private groups which I hope will be able to go live in the next few weeks - I’m anticipating (optional) groups for localisations (other than countries) - for example, racing alongside people in London or people whose favourite film of 2022 was Moonfall. Maybe both options are too specifically targeted for me, but hopefully this might add another community element to the site.
Privacy Note: I’ll be updating the Privacy Policy and Terms of Service over the coming weeks to ensure everything is as clear and transparent as possible.
💬 Community
The AoDR Deathies: The timeline has been announced for the Deathies, and there’s still tie to get involved and help shape the "special branches" for our community version of the Oscars, join us on Discord or see the Reddit announcement.
The /r/OscarsDeathRace subreddit has regular updates on regional availability of films, as well as other news. This year’s 38 days of film schedule has been finalised and starts with Weapons on Thursday 5th Feb.
☕ Support
I genuinely really appreciate (and need!!!) the support of subscribers and donors to the site. If you enjoy the tools and want to support the site, there are two ways to help:
Subscribe or Donate: For just £12 a year, you can go ad-free, get a custom avatar on the leaderboards, and unlock other subscriber-only tools. Subscribe here.
Free Support: If you can’t support financially, you can still help by disabling ad-blockers on the site and following/liking my lists on Letterboxd. Every bit of engagement helps the site grow.