The Sixth Annual Mildly Pleased Awards

The time has come again for another Mildly Pleased Awards and my body is willing but my spirit is broken. The idea of an awards show for the stuff that doesn’t stand out, for the forgotten middle, feels like it’s at its most inessential after a full year of blasting moderates and centrists for allowing bullshit to bulldoze us. So let’s dispel the notion that this is anything but three friends taking a chance to talk about art that otherwise would go undiscussed. Because yeah, Brett Ratner jokes aren’t as funny anymore and tomorrow sounds a lot scarier than it did a few years ago, but this is still our lives, damnit! Now that we’re into 2018, I take to heart this advice from Hurray for the Riff Raff: “do your best but fuck the rest, be something.”

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The Fifth Annual Mildly Pleased Awards

If you’re being honest, do all the non-Oscars movie awards shows matter to you? Do you care about the various guilds’ picks? What about lists from critics, newspapers, and blogs? Certainly you don’t care about the Golden Globes, right? Not really, at least, because all those people are going to be talking about the same 10 or so movies which are undeniably great. And that’s true, to a lesser extent, in pretty much every medium.

That is why, for five years now, the Mildly Pleased Awards have celebrated the “good, not great” works that would otherwise go forgotten. After all, everyone one of us just lived through a whole 365 days of 2016. If we were to just talk about the 10 good days, it wouldn’t really do the year justice, would it? So join us as we count down the most OK video games, music, TV, and film from the last year. Oh, and hit the jump to check out our viral video nominees… They’re fine!

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The Fourth Annual Mildly Pleased Awards

We’re all varying degrees of sports fans here at Mildly Pleased, let me tell you how 2015 went for us. In football, the Seahawks finished a great 2014 season with an amazing run in the playoffs followed by 99% of a great Super Bowl, lost in the end by a questionable play call that will reverberate pangs of regret through all Seattleites’ hearts for years to come. In baseball, the Mariners seemed poised for a redemption year after some clutch pre-season signings and then went on to betray that hype and have one of the most depressingly disappointing seasons in franchise history. I don’t care about the Sounders and we don’t have an NHL or NBA team.

That’s the kind of worldview you get at the Mildly Pleased Awards, one of people so accustomed to disappointment and failure that even glimpses of hope sometimes need to be cherished. We’re not looking for the best or the greatest, we’re just looking for something that’s OK. Something that’s a little better than average. Something that you can walk out of the theater or whatever and respond, when your friend asks you what you thought about it, “that was mildly pleasing.” That is our battle cry.

Viral Video Nominees
Guy slipping on ice for 9 seconds
Guy annoys girlfriend with puns at Ikea
Amazon vs. Walmart
Nice, Ron
Smells Like Teen Shovel

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The Third Annual Mildly Pleased Awards

Hey, wow, did you see those album lists we did? Well, expect more where that came from. A lot more. Well, wait. Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. After all, our sort-of slogan is “Lower your expectations.” And you know, sometimes I forget to do that. Every year I find myself getting crushed because I’m disappointed the latest big budget action movie isn’t the next Citizen Kane or the new Jack White album isn’t simultaneously a return to White Stripes form while an invention of something provocative and genre-defying. Sometimes stuff’s just stuff, and I’ve got to deal with it. And that’s what the Mildly Pleased Awards are all about.

Join us as we discuss the most acceptable stuff of 2014. The video games, TV shows, albums, movies and more that are flawed, but not irredeemable. And I mean, aren’t we all? Maybe it’s time we stop chasing some delusion of perfection and start looking for the beauty within the mundane. Because life’s too short and too sad to not at least laugh at how nuts Russel Crowe gets in Noah.

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The Second Annual Mildly Pleased Awards

It’s a tradition older than the royal baby, the PlayStation 4, and SnapChat. More respectable than Duck Dynasty, Paula Deen, and probably some not racist things too. That’s right, it’s the Mildly Pleased Awards, America’s chance to look back at a year of mediocrity. Even though 2013 seems to have been particularly grueling and painful to get through, it’s easy to get lost in all the bad shit. Or in all the really great shit. But what about the day-to-day, you know? Life’s not all peaks and valleys, sometimes it just is, you dig? Like Tony Shalhoub said, in his immortal role as Tech Sgt. Chen in Galaxy Quest, “It’s the simple things in life you treasure.” And these are some simple-ass things.

Check out our nominees for best viral video of the year after the break!

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The Mildly Pleased Awards

2013! The super future! No one planned for humanity making it this far. Instead of staring down into the scary void that is the unknown future, let us instead look back at the year that was 2012. What we’ve got planned is about a month of best of 2012 lists. Why? Because we don’t have press passes, it take us time to catch up with everything. Plus, January is boring and nothing’s going on anyway. But before we get to the best ofs, there’s the Mildly Pleased Awards.

What are the Mildly Pleased Awards? They are an opportunity to look back at the things that often fall through the cracks on normal award shows – the stuff that is neither exceptionally bad nor especially good. The stuff that most people walk away from thinking, “well, that was OK,” and then immediately forget about. We remember.

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