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How Rotten Tomatoes may have radically skewed the Oscars’ Best Picture race
- forkandwait 9y agoI 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.
- sfsylvester 9y agoCausation 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.
- jasonmp85 9y agoRotten 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.
- the_watcher 9y agoScores 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.
- fein 9y agoThe 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.
- jasonmp85 9y ago> 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?
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoIs this context, "virtue signaling" usually means "there's more media focused on black/female/queer characters and I'm angry about it."
- emodendroket 9y agoRoughly, 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.
- dasm 9y agoVirtue signalling seems to a popular term among the alt-right. I would assume that this is a thinly-veiled reference to Black Panther.
- bitwize 9y agoBlack 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.
- dahdum 9y agoIt been popular for 10 years or so, not just with the alt right. I like using it when pointing out soulless corporatism and hypocrisy.
- ibdf 9y agoI stopped using that site after realizing I barely ever agree with them.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- mulmen 9y agoAre you talking about theverge.com or rottentomatoes?
- ibdf 9y agorottentomatoes
- varren 9y agoSame here. I tend to use https://rateyourmusic.com/films/chart 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)
- MiddleEndian 9y agoMy 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.
- JBlue42 9y agoFor 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.
- harry8 9y agoSome 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...
- JBlue42 9y ago>It's impossible to be cynical enough about Hollywood... Same could be said about SV, DC, etc...
- gamblor956 9y agoMost 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.
- srtjstjsj 9y ago> Some studios also send out DVDs in packages filled with bribes.
- jczhang 9y agofatuous, i like this word haha.