Usually when I forget to post the poll winner (delayed last week by first a holiday and then a tie) until Monday, I just let it go. But we have a couple of auto-qualifiers whose requestors need to be notified, so I may as well quickly inform y'all that Ride Lonesome, last seen by me in 2002, defeated Free Solo 55% to 45% (which I used to think of as a fairly close race but following politics more closely now has me think "10-point blowout"). Pretty sure it's not my favorite Boetticher, remember it much less fondly than Seven Men From Now and The Tall T, but let's take another look. It's rentable, streaming on the Roku Channel, etc.
And then two films have done their time in the trenches. Branagh's Henry V made it to showdown four times but never closed the deal; it's possibly my favorite Shakespeare film using the original text (we'll see whether I prefer it to Throne of Blood and Ran), but I haven't seen it for at least 30 years, probably closer to 35. Own the DVD but will likely watch what I assume is a higher-def stream on MGM+. Also hitting week 52 is Xiao Wu, far and away my favorite Jia film, unseen by me since 2001. It never made it to showdown. Criterion Channel's got that one.
You know what I'd totally forgotten and was just reminded of via googling for something barely related? There was a brief period when the Skandies results got treated like significant cinephile news. (Which is pretty remarkable since it's always just been a bunch of my friends and online acquaintances who do the voting; there's no actual organization to speak of. Just something I decided to do 30 years ago and have kept going.)
(Btw your hed and dek should not be identical. But maybe that's some archival glitch. Also "the 2014's best film"? Drop the "the." Just "2014's best film." It's cleaner.)