Announcing: The Celebrity Boyfriend Bracket

The Boyfriend Bracket has become a wonderful tradition around here at HIMTM, celebrating the best in TV Boyfriends and Movie Boyfriends. This year, we’re dropping the fictional characters and talking about the real men behind them.

That’s right – anyone and everyone who has some level of fame is eligible. Well, almost everyone. Here are the rules:

• For sorting purposes, we’ll have the following categories: TV actors, movie actors, athletes, musicians, and miscellaneous, which will encompass anyone not easily sorted into the previous four categories.
  • Men will be categorized based on what they are best known for – so while Justin Timberlake keeps trying to be an actor, he will always be a musician first and foremost.
  • Eventually I’ll combine two of the categories to make one bracket, depending on which have the fewest number of entrants.
• There’s no real criteria to “some level of fame,” other than a reasonable amount of readers of this blog knowing who he is. I could probably make an entire bracket of NHL players I’d like to date, but I recognize that that bracket wouldn’t appeal to the general population. Regional crushes are tough as well – your local meteorologist is probably ineligible, unless you have a very convincing argument.
• All nominations must be heterosexual men. This was actually a very long debate amongst my advisory board (aka my friends), and while this renders certain incredible guys ineligible (sorry, no Anderson Cooper), we have to tether this thing to at least a shred of reality.
• As I’ve emphasized every year, this is a bracket of date-ability, not fuck-ability. It’s not a one night stand bracket. Don Draper was seeded lower for a reason; this is Jon Hamm’s time to shine.
• Brackets will be seeded according to a very complicated formula that goes something like: hotness + talent × (personality + sense of humor) ÷ arrest record – number of songs written about him by Taylor Swift.

I already have a Google Doc started that could probably fill out an entire bracket already, but I wanted to open the floor for nominations from you, my wonderful readers. Think outside the box a little – of course Timberlake and Krasinski and Rudd and Crosby are going to be on this thing. Where you come in is alerting us to the guys I might be overlooking – who gets your heart aflutter, and why?