Memeforum Presents: The Mimis!

An Award Show Inspired Blog Post

Logo by Lina Khan

Welcome to the first annual* MiMis, an award-show-inspired blog post from Memeforum. I’ve put my observations about the Internet, Culture, and Internet Culture into one place and decided to award the best of the best from last year. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time on and writing about the internet so I feel comfortable revealing that the awards voting body is me, myself, and I. Without further ado, let’s start the show Blog Post!

Best White Boy of the Month Run

Josh O’Connor

Jeremy Allen White

Mike Faist

Glen Powell

Timothee Chalamet

Jacob Elordi

Paul Mescal

The list is pretty much unchanged from previous years. These are our boys for now. One boy however reigns supreme. He is my favorite because he’s putting in the work. He’s unembarrassed and loves the attention. Everyone else is a little too cool for the whole ordeal. They are either too much of an artist or don't like all the attention but Timothee Chalamet never shies away. He takes on interesting and embarrassing projects in stride. He’s unafraid of the women who worship at his feet. It’s fitting that he is our Paul Atreides. He takes to the ways of White Boy of the Month, and even movie star, as if born to them. Maybe it’s because he’s not only a red-blooded American but more specifically a Franco-New Yorker who went to LaGuardia Performing Arts High School. He lacks the humility of Midwesterners and Australians alike. For Timmy, all of the attention is never enough. Sure the other boys are talented enough actors but they're shy, something you could never accuse Timothee of being. He's got it all AND he's doing something with it. Everyone else is just trying to keep up.

Best Meme Picture

Dune 2

Wicked pt 1

The Substance

Challengers

Twisters

Madame Web

Movies continue to be back and they’re back in the best way: middlebrow and mid-budget. The Oscars are fun but they’re once a year and fail to award movies that entertain above all else. We’ve exited The Age of Avengers and want to be entertained simply. The internet’s relationship to a film is no longer inversely related to how good it is. It has to be sifted through and understood on a case-by-case basis. I would say the memes for each of the films nominated this year reflect the unique relationships the public can have with movies of all kinds. Madame Web is our classic so bad it’s good. This is a familiar kind of attention the internet pays to movies. It’s always fun to make fun of something, especially when the stars themselves seem to be making fun of it. The public loves Dune 2 with the devoted and studied love of a nerd. They love Wicked like theater kids. Both of these loves are genuine and meet the material where it is. The Substance is the shapes and colors attempt at intellectualism, making it a film Twitter favorite. It’s French! It won Best Screenplay at Cannes! It’s elevated horror! Any cinephile knows these 3 things in combination amount to a disaster but add in some cunty body suits and a career revival and maybe it’s not so bad. Twisters is the hero of the category to me. A retvrn to Blockbuster filmmaking that’s mostly stupid but very fun. If it were a little bit smarter or a little bit more fun (where’s the kissing???) it would be my winner but it’s simply a good first attempt to make it 1997 again by science or magic. The best meme picture is of course Challengers. Sexual Tension the Movie starring the Zillenial’s Princess and white boys only people with letterboxd accounts care about. It had everything we wanted from the movies this year: a plot worth making fan cams about. It was made for us on the internet and we took to as we should. Everyone involved was firing on all cylinders, audience included.

Best Pop Star

Charli XCX

Chappell Roan

Sabrina Carpenter

Addison Rae

Gracie Abrams

Plenty of adults bemoan that being a stan of someone has become similar to being their agent. It’s not about artistry anymore it’s about business. The game has changed but for me and gay guys who work in marketing, this is better. I enjoy pitting women against each other and this allows me to do that with concrete numbers to point to. It’s not show fans, it’s show business!! The girls put on a good show this year. There were a lot of career moves to follow and mistakes to be made. Gracie and Addison made some good moves but it’s not their time yet. There’s nowhere to go but up for these two. Sabrina and Chappel were living the results of their long-term plans. They put in the work and reaped the rewards. However, only one pop star truly ascended and brought all her friends with her. This was the apex for Charli XCX. Charli has been making my favorite music since I was a teenager and every album cycle has been the one where she’s going to break through. This time it happened and it was better than we ever even dreamed it.

These next three categories celebrate women at all stages of life. Mother of the Year celebrates achievement in mothering. Cousin of the Year celebrates one's potential to mother in the future. Diva of the Year is all about personality, and while age is not a requirement most Divas have the benefit of time. All of these categories are less about actual achievement and more about personality. Living life with a certain joi de vivre, though different for everyone cannot be quantified by a simple list of achievements.

Cousin of The Year

Kate Martin

Alex Consani

Selena Gomez

Grace O'Malley

Hope Walz

Cousin of The Year is a kind of rising star title. Less clearly defined and more hopeful than Mother of the Year. Someone you feel affection for without maybe fully understanding their whole deal. These young women made strides in their fields and gained some fans in the process, whatever it is they’re doing, they’re getting there. Selena Gomez is the Glen Close of Cousin of the Year category. She’s been here for a while and I feel like she’s almost figured it out. Everyone is somewhat on her side until she commits yet another blunder, barring herself from ever truly winning. Alex Consani is on her way to be one of Gen Z’s only true supermodels. She is charming on and off the runway. She’s ready to be exalted to the status she so desperately deserves. There are two things stopping her: Her unwavering support of Palestine (which I love) and her Blaccent (which I hate). Hope Walz may not be the true cousin of the year but she does win the award for Most Normal Girl in the World and that has to count for something. In all my travels in all the world, I haven’t seen a girl as normal as Hope Walz. To maintain her normalcy in the face of a failed presidential campaign and a pivot to TikTok is an impressive feat. Kate Martin is the Cinderella story in Cousin of the Year. Caitlin Clark’s best friend from Iowa was drafted from the audience and went on to have an incredible rookie season in the WNBA. She’s not the future of Women’s basketball but she is a fun addition to the landscape. Classic Cousin. The true cousin of the year was Grace O’Malley, the ex-barstool employee and ex-best friend of current Barstool employee Brianna Chickenfry. The fallout between these two women was one of the most discussed events of the year among people who spend too much time on their phones. In the fallout, most people were Team Grace. We have an unyielding affection for this girl more for her personality than anything she has done. We just think she’s nice.

Mother of The Year

Kamala Harris

Sandra Huller

Nancy Pelosi

Isabella Rossellini in Conclave

Mother of the Year is an interesting race this year. We have Presidential Candidate Kamala Harris, who had things been different would have been a winner. We could all wax poetic about what happened and why but for now, we’ll chalk it up to the July heat, misogyny, and other failures of the democratic party. We also have Sandra Huller, a kind of Wire Mother of the Year. Occasionally we love a German import, someone who resists our attempts to know them para-socially or exalt them the way we do American celebrities. As much as we love international stars, I prefer to keep things local. Nancy Pelosi ran a kind of shadow campaign. Online, we have come to recognize her as one of the Democrat’s best master manipulators, and not just of the stock market. The kind of old-school Italian woman who wields her powers behind the scenes to get the outcome she wants. The men who surround her have higher titles and more recognized power but she strikes fear into the hearts of Presidents, or so we’ve decided. Had her plan come to fruition, she might be a winner. But the Winner this year is Isabella Rossellini in Conclave. The same archetype as Nancy Pelosi but we can rest easy with this winner knowing the character is fictional and cannot commit insider trading. Not only a Mother of the Year but a Mother Superior.

Best Diva

Madame Web

Kate Middleton

Club Chalamet

The Unknown

Glamorous Diva Wash

To define “Diva” would be to limit the ways in which one could be a Diva. This year we had many achievements in the world of Divaness. Madame Web, encompassing the film, the character, and the actress who plays her, an overall achievement in not caring too much and creating something mid in the process. Madame Web elevated the art form that is saying “sure” and seeing what happens. Kate Middleton enacted one of the great fantasies many of us harbor, being a princess in hiding. Whole countries mobilized to discover your whereabouts and make your cheating husband, the Prince of Wales look bad in the process. All Diva qualities. A Diva does not have to be a person, a Diva could be a fictional character who does not fall under copyright infringement. The Willy Wonka Experience was mostly a cautionary tale about the dangers of AI, except for when inspiration struck and The Unknown was created. We learned just how far you can get with a bad wig, a mask, and a mirror. A Diva could even be an inanimate object. Glamorous Diva wash is the It Girl Laundry Detergent. Depending on your pheromones it either smells amazing or makes you throw up, which is classic Diva behavior. All great entries in the storied history of Divas. However one Diva reigned supreme and that was Club Chalamet. Club Chalamet is not just a superfan, we’ve seen those before. She’s also a sophisticate. She pays for Twitter Blue to write her missives not only about Timothee, the object of her obsessive affection but about movies and show business at large. She’s a diva in all aspects of her life. We met her through her love of Timmy but she's an interesting character in her own right. That’s why she is the Diva of the Year.

Best New Vocab

Stuns

Crash Out

Aura

Which Could Mean Nothing

Lock in

Khia Asylum

It would not be a glorified best-of-the-internet list if I did not talk about all those crazy new phrases the kids are saying. This year aside from one or two exceptions we mostly just recontextualized old phrases. The first word we added to our vocabulary was “Stuns” as in “Stuns in New Photo” the peculiar way Pop Crave chose to editorialize red carpet shots and selfies of celebrities. This one requires a lot of context and doesn’t often leave the internet, it’s more of an inside joke than an addition to language. “Crash Out” and “Lock In” are two sides of the same coin. A “we’re so back/it’s so over” for a new era. These two are more about personal responsibility though. “Lock In” is the step one has to take before we can be so back. “Crash Out” is a new iteration of the once inescapable “Mental Breakdown” and mostly just means crying. “Which Could Mean Nothing” is a phrase that could only come from the internet. In the world of speculation, celebrity gossip, and paywalls “Which could mean nothing” is a way to save yourself from a cease and desist while implying two celebrities are gay for each other. It’s good to have in the arsenal but is again too limited to the internet. Khia Asylum is the exception that proves that rule, it’s so nonsensical it breaks containment. Of course, it’s also functional. We did not have a word for this phenomenon beforehand and though we had our best minds talking about it in publications of repute, it was always going to be the stans who named it and did it better than the intellectuals ever could. The best new phrase was always going to come from the teenage boys. They’re better at naming and coining phrases than anyone. They are also more guarded than anyone about maintaining their coolness which is how they have roundaboutly created one of the most interesting additions to our slang. Aura is our best new vocab.

Best Event

Brat Summer

The Democratic National Convention

Look A Like Contests

The Olympics

The Willy Wonka Experience

TikTok Rizz Party

The year began with the Willy Wonka experience, which History will remember as a harbinger of doom for the AI era. When everyone is an artist and event promoter with the help of Midjourney et al, no one is truly good at it and we’re left with the scraps of an experience. I want to believe there is some hope for the future so I refuse to let that be the event of the year. Brat Summer was everything we wanted it to be. I don’t know how to explain it to those we weren’t on the wavelength but it was perfect. It ended at the right time and fizzled out when it was supposed to. Fake fans and grown-ups were exhausted but the real angels got everything they wanted. Brat summer ended with free bleeding in the autumn rain, as it was supposed to. Brat summer even made one of the best every-4-year events we have even better: The Olympics! The Olympics were exactly what we needed them to be. Corrupt, Inspiring, Silly, Ridiculous, and hosted in a country where we all feel comfortable making fun of the local customs. The Olympics had 10s across the board, but that doesn’t mean we’ll remember it. The other every-4-year event we… celebrated? this year was The Democratic National Convention. No one wanted to be the Meme Event of the year more than the Convention. However, wanting it makes you look desperate. They stretched what could have been an exciting moment of hope and change into four days of torturous pandering. The party went on too long and by the end, no one was having fun. In the fall, Redditors with too much energy fashioned themselves into a kind of carnival barker to run a sideshow that could only exist in the Internet era. It’s fun and DIY but the ease with which they are put together makes me think their talents could be better used elsewhere than a fleeting meme. There was one event we didn’t know we were invited to until after it happened. The TikTok Rizz party as it came to be known was the sweet sixteen of a girl from Long Island that went viral. We were allowed to observe the inner machinations of a friend group of teenage boys. This event sparked a thousand videos that allowed to do us a play-by-play of a situation we’ve all found ourselves in, dancing in a circle. Finally, we had an outlet for all the analysis we had been doing and it was completely safe because it was all baseless speculation. The TikTok Rizz Party was the Event of the year.

This concludes the first half of the MiMis. The second half will be behind a paywall and includes awards such as The Jean Herscholt Humanitarian Award for Solved Discourse, Best Edit, Best TikTok, Best Tweet, and a special appearance by Hawk Tuah and Luigi Mangione.