This is a catchy sentence designed to make you read the following article. It will be followed by something slightly off-putting, like "Want to watch a video that features a special-needs child with a trendy, topical disease?" No need to be offended, though, for this next sentence explains the off-putting remark, and that special-needs child is one of the stereotypical movie characters featured in A Trailer for Every Academy Award–Winning Movie Ever Made — a Cracked.com video produced by the comedy duo Britanick.
Next comes the paragraph full of necessary background information: Britanick consists of Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher, two NYU graduates "wasting their degrees" by making funny videos and posting them online. You'll learn that they're from Atlanta, that they majored in film and drama and that they have been working together since 2004, when Kocher helped McElhaney with his freshman-year film project. A Trailer for Every Academy Award–Winning Movie Ever Made is their latest, and most successful, endeavor. Britanick earned $1,000 for the skit, which Kocher says they spent mostly on food.
In this paragraph you'll learn that the video is a trailer for a fictional movie featuring an affluent white man, his female love interest, his special-needs brother (now does the first sentence make sense?), a Latin-American teenager who needs help believing in himself, and a wrongfully convicted black man. Basically, everything you need to win the Best Picture Oscar at the Academy Awards.
"We love the Oscars, but they do have a specific type of film they pick," says Kocher, in a succinct quote that I have provided for your benefit — and to help me transition into this next paragraph, in which I talk about the video's cultural relevance (the Oscars). Then I'll point out that the trailer's formulaic script, in which the characters satirize the genre by describing themselves in relation to the film, has been done before. I'll provide a few examples, such as British broadcaster Charlie Booker's "How to Report the News" segment and The Onion's fake story "Some Bulls___ Happening Somewhere."
Now comes the part of the article that discusses the specific inspirations for Britanick's trailer:
Rain Man
Good Will Hunting
The Shawshank Redemption
Forrest Gump
And of course A Beautiful Mind, which McElhaney says gave them the initial idea.
Some writers might explain the obvious similarities between these films and the fictional trailer (such as how A Beautiful Mind and Good Will Hunting inspired the giant math equation), but you're a smart reader and can probably make the connections yourself. So we'll move along to the next phase: proof of the video's popularity.
Since it was posted online March 5, A Trailer for Every Academy Award–Winning Movie Ever Made has been viewed more than 600,000 times on Cracked.com and an additional 250,000 times on YouTube. This fact tells you that the video is popular and that you should watch it if you want to be cool.
And that's pretty much it. The last paragraph of this generic article about a popular Internet video just summarizes what you already know and ends with a witty observation that makes me, the writer, seem hip. Maybe I'll point out that the movie would never win an Oscar for one simple reason.
It forgot to mention the Holocaust.