Grid: 13 minutes; Meta: 5 less
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Matt Gaffney’s Wall Street Journal contest crossword, “You’ll Figure it Out” — Conrad’s writeup.
This week we’re looking for an Oscar-winning movie of the 21st century. There were eight symmetric theme entries: four across and four down. Each contained MILE:
WSJ Contest – 04.04.2025
- 2d: SE(MILE)GAL: [Like some questionable actions]
- 3d: CHAMO(MILE): [Teahouse option]
- 18a: FACSI(MILE): [Carbon copy]
- 21a: FER(MILE)VEL: [Total chemical potential for electrons]
- 34d: MI(MILE)DER: [She directed “On the Basis of Sex” and “Deep Impact”]
- 35d: E(MILE)ZOLA: [Paul Muni was Oscar-nominated for playing him in 1937]
- 55a: (MILE)YCYRUS: [Hannah Montana portrayer]
- 60a: ALLS(MILE)S: [Happy as a clam]
I noticed the MILEs pretty quickly while filling in the grid. My mind went to The Green Mile (not realizing that it was an Oscar-winning movie of the 2oth century). And also: no sign of green in the grid. Then I counted eight miles before I completed the grid and I had our contest solution: 8 Mile.
Impressive construction: fitting eight miles into the grid could not have been easy. And it was nice that Matt added the 21st century hint in the clue too avoid erroneous Green Mile submissions. Fun puzzle. Solvers: please share your thoughts.
Two weird things. 1) Using a word from the title in the central across clue (in this case, “figure”) almost always means that entry is relevant to the meta. I wonder if Matt did this on purpose as a red herring, or didn’t realize it. 2) I always thought that “Oscar-winning movie” meant that the movie won best picture, but that’s not the case here. Eminem won for best original song, but the movie itself didn’t win anything.
The way I see it, a movie can win an Oscar for all kinds of things: the cinematography, the screenplay, the music, the costume design, etc.
Maybe the title is a subtle clue as in “ Figure of Eight “?
Fitting eight MILEs in the grid doesn’t seem easy, otherwise we won’t be seeing stuffs like MMCMI or PEALE crossing MIMILEDER
We also thought it might be relevant that the meta grid answers came in pairs – giving you M & M (Eminem). Which, if intentional, was a nice touch. We watched the movie followed by a documentary on Eminem on Prime on Saturday. Loved the movie. Learned a lot about Eminem we didn’t know.
Fun one Matt!! Very enjoyable!!
I thought of The Green Mile too but only because it is the only movie with a Mile in the title I had heard of, but a quick google told me it was nominated for four Oscars but did not win any. I then wrote down 8 Mile on the puzzle and googled that. Et voila! As for “figure” I took it to mean figure 8, as in skating. That helped me feel assured I had the right answer.