Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:

A man is on track to succeed in his career through natural talent and hard work. However, he’s also in love with a young woman. Circumstances force him to choose between his career and the woman he loves. In the end, despite uncertainty and pressure, he chooses the woman. The two of them stare fondly as the credits roll.

Which movie did I just describe? Good Will Hunting? The Family Man? Regarding Henry? If we reverse the genders, we can add Sweet Home Alabama, The Devil Wears Prada, You’ve Got Mail and a dozen others to the list. You saw it in Felicity and you saw it on Friends. You see it every time you turn on the television.

But you don’t see it in real life.

Love.

I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to pick my favorite cliches from the 84 comments we received. Most comments had multiple entries. So in total, we got hundreds and hundreds of cliches (approximately half an episode of 24). It took me hours to write this post; the fact that there was absolutely no prize at stake makes it all the more embarrassing.

But in all seriousness, I’m astonished at how clever you all are. There were many fantastic lines that had me giggling on the subway, and I’m sure that if I sat down to do it again I’d pick a completely different set of cliches. So basically, feel free to disregard this post entirely.

I tried, people. Really, I did. Lord knows, there have been many occasions in my life where I said I would do something, but then The Prestige was on HBO. But I totally intended to select the winners of the Clichemageddon contest for today.

The problem is that you are just too funny, internet. I’m pretty sure I spent less time picking out my kid’s name than I have over the last week weighing the merits of various mock-cliches. I printed out 22 pages worth of them, and went to work with my trusty highlighter. But I reached a point at which it was clear the amount of entries I was highlighting would require me to print out THAT list, and go through it a SECOND time with a highlighter, perhaps of a different color. Then I watched The Prestige, which is really awesome.

All this is to say, between phoning it in and putting it off, I choose to wait until next week and write a nice big Clichemageddon post. So stay tuned for Clichemageddon: The Reckoning. And hey, since it’s so damn pretty, here’s that animated gif again:

In a world where summer blockbusters loomed right around the corner…

Only one website could hold a contest to celebrate…

Is that animated GIF giving you a seizure yet? Good. You will need to build up your tolerance to rapid-fire explosions if you plan on surviving summer movie season.

Summer movies are all about… good Lord, that thing is annoying. Okay, everybody click “More” to get rid of it. I’ll see you on the other side…

In this Oscar Week edition of the Think Tank, the Overthinking It writers announce the first annual OTIs Awards for the year 2008.