How Rotten Tomatoes may have radically skewed the Oscars’ Best Picture race | Hacker News Reader

How Rotten Tomatoes may have radically skewed the Oscars’ Best Picture race

theverge.com

25 pointsSREinSF44 comments

Some large fraction of the academy haven't seen the movies. Winning over that fraction is massively important. Marketing has been one way, not mentioned in the article. They literally pay to advertise to advance Oscar winning prospects. If you haven't seen the movie but need to vote on it then following the prevailing zeitgeist is a pretty common technique, rotten tomatoes strongly influences that zeitgeist, probably more strongly than the advertising and pr campaigns.

The real problem is most members voting clearly haven't seen the films and aren't voting their own opinion. If you can call anything of this utterly fatuous nature a problem at all. It's impossible to be cynical enough about Hollywood...

Most Academy members actually have seen all or most of the nominees. The Academy isn't as big as people think it is. It's not all of Hollywood; membership is only approximately 7000 people. The Academy holds free screenings in LA and New York in December, January, and February for Academy members and their guests. Some studios also send out DVDs or provide rebates for digital streaming.

The biggest problem WRT voting is actually Academy members forgetting to send their ballots in on time, which they addressed this year by switching to online voting.

Source: A number of good friends are Academy members and I have been to several of these screenings.

> Some studios also send out DVDs

in packages filled with bribes.

>It's impossible to be cynical enough about Hollywood...

Same could be said about SV, DC, etc...

fatuous, i like this word haha.

I stopped using that site after realizing I barely ever agree with them.

Same here. I tend to use https://rateyourmusic.com/films/chart more often these days. Less bots than Imdb, no metacritic/rotten tomatoes "professional" critics. Also rateyourmusic gave me lots of hidden gems. The UI is from 90-th, but i can live with that)

For myself, I try not to watch trailers for something I want to see in the theatre and don't read reviews until after. AV Club has smart film and tv people but the site is unreadable now. Vox and RogerEbert are good, plus I subscribed to some blogs. I don't necessarily want to get agree with the critics I'm reading -- being challenged in your thinking is part of the game of art, right?

What's worth having, if you actually care enough, are people that you consider smart media interpreters on deck if you need some help navigating how you feel about something after.

As to RT, Metacritic, etc. that seems mainly beneficial for those with little time to actually decide. And if you have kids, you're probably going to end up seeing a fair bit of dross anyway.

Over the years, I watch less and less trailers, or only watch the first 10 seconds to get an idea of what the movie is about, but todays trailers come with a pre-trailer clip which already reviews too much. There's room for a business/website that talks about movies without giving anything away.

Yeah, teasers are about the best I'll do for the same reasons.

Most good reviewers don't go into plot too much or spoiler-y. The ethos at RogerEbert.com is to help people make informed decision. Same for those sites targeted to parents.

The trailers are all marketing, to hit people over the head over and over again. Not to mention commercial tie-ins that ruin things (looking at you Black Panther Lexus commercial during the Olympics). It's funny that advertising costs have actually increased for movies in this era of pretty much free buzz via social media platforms.

My favorite rating system was Netflix's back when they had a star system. I rated a large chunk of movies and it gave me expected ratings based on the opinions of users with similar tastes. I miss that system.

Are you talking about theverge.com or rottentomatoes?

rottentomatoes

I wonder what movies of this last year would have won under the old voting regime? Personally, the Oscars agree with my taste more than ever.

Causation vs Correlation.

My own belief is that the majority of those who rate films online tend to be of a younger demographic. As members of the Academy themselves get younger, it's not completely outside the realms of possibility that the two tastes become more aligned.

Rotten Tomatoes is an aggregator of published reviews for a given film. While they do expose an "audience score", that's not what people are talking about when they say something has e.g. a 95 on Rotten Tomatoes. It's the percent of e.g. well-known newspaper, internet, and broadcast film critics who react positively to a given film.

Scores on Rotten Tomatoes are almost always referring to the "Top Critics" score, which aggregates reviews of actual film critics. It's not just Yelp for movies.

The real surprise here is that there is anyone left who thinks that RT scores aren't basically paid marketing for whatever film is in question, and are real organic reviews.

Especially with the recent virtue signaling olympics that movie critics have been going through to evaluate movies on anything but their actual quality.

> Especially with the recent virtue signaling olympics that movie critics have been going through to evaluate movies on anything but their actual quality.

What the christ does this mean?

Virtue signalling seems to a popular term among the alt-right. I would assume that this is a thinly-veiled reference to Black Panther.

It been popular for 10 years or so, not just with the alt right. I like using it when pointing out soulless corporatism and hypocrisy.

Yeah, it seems to be another term for disingenuous but much more buzzy and maybe more political?

From the Wikipedia page:

Examples of behavior described as virtue signalling include changing Facebook profile pictures to support a cause, participation in the Ice Bucket Challenge, offering thoughts and prayers after a tragedy, celebrity speeches during award shows, politicians pandering to constituents on ideological issues

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling

Black Panther earned its success, as did Wonder Woman. Alt-righters who complain about them are truly lone voices. But there were two major movies in recent memory -- Ghostbusters (2016) and Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi -- that had unusually high RT scores that they may not have gotten if they hadn't been so on message. Doubtless the critics involved were trying to reassure everyone that they weren't one of those people. Had they spoken the truth and said, for example, that Ghostbusters (2016) was ill-paced, obnoxious, and mostly unfunny, the likes of Jezebel would have raked them over the coals and you know it. That's what they did to James Rolfe, for simply saying he would not see the movie.

Roughly, that he thinks that movie reviewing has become about signalling allegiance to a political cause, to the exclusion of other considerations. I'm not sure I see the relationship to people being paid off, though.

Is this context, "virtue signaling" usually means "there's more media focused on black/female/queer characters and I'm angry about it."

A movie’s quality will always be criticized in he context of the culture it’s viewed in. Objective quality is not the most relevant metric in art.

RT is certainly losing my favor, it's Disney garbage everywhere, the top movies consist of whatever came out in the last 2 years, the algorithm just isn't good.

Their algorithm is mostly unchanged as far as I can tell. They take a bunch of critics and aggregate their reviews as positive or negative. Therefore most of their highly recommended movies are, and always have been, predominantly broad-appeal films that are mostly inoffensive.

RT's increasing popularity has created pressure to make more mass-appeal mediocre movies, as movies are rewarded for being "watchable" and get no bonus points for being "excellent" (and excellence which might turn off segments of the audience if any controversial choices are made en route).

I'm not entirely convinced this is a result of RT. Studios have been looking for ways to produce broad appeal blockbusters forever.

> Objective quality is not the most relevant metric in art.

And this is a disturbing trend.

Art, by definition should not be objectively evaluated. Art is inherently subjective - objectively great art would not be art, as it loses personal meaning.

Comrade Zhdanov would not put it better.

Perhaps you meant to compare the commentor above me to Zhdanov? His views seem diametrically opposed to what I said.

Right, the mania for 'politically correct' inspection of music, art, etc. went viral with Zhdanov, and even those who found the Soviets too authoritarian took it up with glee.

When was objective quality ever the most relevant metric in art? Why do you believe this is a trend?

The disturbing trend is people thinking objective criticism is possible, let alone desirable. Objective measurements of art literally do not exist.

Not all metrics are equivalent though. When art is judged more for some political statement it is trying to make than its intrinsic beauty or quality we can disregard that metric as illegitimate if our goal is to appraise the value of art in itself.

The political statement a piece of art is trying to make is a part of its intrinsic beauty or quality. Art does not exist in a vacuum, it always exists in a human context. Politics are inescapable, in art and in all other forms of human endeavor.

"Orwell's latest book is a rollicking farmyard tale of pigs versus humans held back by the author's political virtue signaling"

No, Orwell's book is a classic that happens to be about politics. It's not about Orwell's political message, it's about the way it was delivered, which indicates there are foundational artistic metrics we use to judge art.

All of Orwell's writing was about politics. Part of the point of it being farm animals was to convey that as a society we are little better than animals.

What you say is true. But when you say "a part", how much of a part is it?

Consider this: in any period of human history there will be political tension of one kind or another. Art will be created in response to that tension. Some we remember, and some we don't.

The art we remember is remembered precisely because it adheres to generic standards of beauty in art, these being eloquence, daring novelty, or something else.

It's not about the message, but how the message is expressed that makes us cherish and remember art, whether it is explicitly political or not.

Yes politics are inescapable, and they color much of what we do, but what defines timeless artistic beauty is separate from the political motivations of the art itself. Otherwise we would not be able to appreciate ancient art whose political climate has long passed.

I'd argue that it's a scale and every piece of art falls somewhere on that scale.

Further, I'd argue that because we don't fully understand the political climate for many ancient works of art that we cannot, in fact, fully appreciate that art within its ancient political context.

As an example, lets say some ancient work, e.g. stone henge, was in fact built either in support of or in protest of the practice of human sacrifice - wouldn't that knowledge enhance the work and our understanding of it?

The timelessness of the artistic beauty is still just a piece of the work as a whole.

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