
How Rotten Tomatoes may have radically skewed the Oscars’ Best Picture race - SREinSF
https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17068324/oscars-2018-best-picture-academy-awards-voting-changes-rotten-tomatoes-oscarssowhite
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harry8
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...

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gamblor956
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.

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srtjstjsj
> Some studios also send out DVDs

in packages filled with bribes.

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

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JBlue42
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.

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ibdf
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.

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JBlue42
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.

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forkandwait
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.

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sfsylvester
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.

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jasonmp85
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.

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fein
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.

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jasonmp85
> 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?

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

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dahdum
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.

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JBlue42
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_signalling)

