I haven’t missed an issue of Entertainment Weekly since October 1993, when I randomly bought a subscription from a kid in my ninth grade geometry class. Since I’ve logged that kind of time on our relationship, I feel I have earned the right to question my beloved now and then.

And don’t get me wrong: I do love EW. Every Friday, I still get a little thrill when it shows up in my mailbox. (For disclosure’s sake, I’m also friends with a staff writer there.)

But sometimes my baby lets me down, as it has done with Issue Number 1,000. (This is a week for disappointing, 1,000-numbered milestones.)

Really, this issue could have been a huge deal. Entertainment Weekly has become so dominant in the field of pop culture reporting and criticism that it has trounced its competitors. Remember when Us used to provide real articles and reviews instead of tabloid pics and “stories” about dieting like a Desperate Housewife? Yeah, they stopped doing that because EW does it better.

But to mark its first foray into quadruple digits, the magazine doesn’t do anything reflective or surprising. Instead, it coughs up hundreds of pages of random lists. They all fall under the heading of “New Classics,” but that’s a flimsy premise for a ton of half-hearted ideas.

(more after the jump)

I mean, do I really need to know what Jodie Foster’s top ten “near-death experiences” in the movies are? Or the top ten reasons that Beck thinks top ten lists are stupid?

But it’s not the randomness of the lists that gets me, or the tired choice to devote even more space to the format. (Heck, there’s certainly been a list or two on The Critical Condition, and I haven’t been doing this for 18 years.) What gets me is that EW provides so little context for its theme. Why did they ask Jodie Foster to reflect on near-death experiences? Why did the let Beck ramble on?

And for more obvious categories, like “new classic” films and music, why does the magazine devote so little room to explaining its choices? Thom Geier’s flippant letter from the editor, which suggests Ricky Gervais and Quentin Tarantino are more talented than Shakespeare, also insists that we’ll all be arguing about these rankings, but why should we? There’s no apparent reason for the “last 25 years” parameter (EW debuted in 1990), and the writers are given less than 75 words or less to defend their reasoning. For “Spinal Tap,” which they dub the Number 11 New Classic Movie, they simply say “This one goes to eleven.” Um… what? I mean, I get the reference to the movie, but is quoting a famous line the same as making a point? ?

Of course, that’s an essay compared to the choices for “25 Perfect Movie Posters,” which are accompanied by no text at all. How can I argue the selection of the poster for Almost Famous if I don’t know why it was chosen in the first place?

Now… I’m not saying these lists demand accompanying graduate theses that defend their candidates, but it’s possible to do something valuable without a lot of space. When Rolling Stone selected the 500 greatest songs of all time, it let its writers engage us in a conversation. Check on this entry on Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” There are actual ideas there, not just soundbites.

And that’s what these lists should be about: Delivering ideas that demand conversation. I think most people realize that art is too subjective to be definitively ranked, but in arguing such things, we get to articulate our relationship to art more effectively. We get to define our personal aesthetic, learn the aesthetics of others, and possibly be awakened to artistic experiences we’ve never had before.

But none of that can happen in the vacuous framework created by EW 1000. That’s especially disappointing since just a few weeks ago, the magazine devoted an entire issue to Sex and the City, and it’s full of meaty pop cultural debate. The capsule reviews of each episode of the series are shorter than some of the items accompanying the “New Classics,” yet they make clearer arguments. I actually did talk to my friends about what was included.

It’s too bad that when the magazine had the chance to celebrate itself, it failed to find a similar focus.