ON FILM: Looking past hype is job of the critic

By Philip Martin

LITTLE ROCK — I talked to an editor at the Associated Press a couple of weeks ago. The AP is considering a new feature, like the weekly poll it conducts during college football season, inwhich newspaper film critics will vote on which films they think are most likely to win Academy Awards. It's described as a "power ranking" of movies, although the details aren't yet worked out. There might be a different poll question every week.

I said it sounded like fun and that I'd be interested in voting and in seeing how the polls come out.

I also said I didn't know whether we'd run the results in the newspaper. The AP editor said that wasfine, they simply planned to make the poll available to their clients - we were under no obligation to run it.

I don't mean to make too much of this, but any AP poll of film critics should be taken in the spirit in which it's offered. A lot of critics (including this one) will "rank" movies they've yet to see. (Just like sportswriters sometimes vote on football teams they haven't seen play.) I haven't seen many Oscar films this year - Heath Ledger will likely get a post-humous nomination for his work in The Dark Knight, I'd like to see Richard Jenkins get a nod for The Visitor, and Wall-E will likely win for animated film - but I can guess as well as anyone. If a poll were held today, Revolutionary Road - which no one has seen yet - would be a Top 5 movie.

But critics don't know anything more than informed moviegoers about who's likely to win these awards, and there are plenty of Oscar buffs who can read the signs better than the critics. It's not a critic's job to think about the award-gathering potential of movies, and it's distressing to see how cultural coverage has ceased being about the ongoing conversation between movies and theiraudiences. Now most coverage is concerned with box-office figures and awards buzz, spiced up with celebrity envy/schadenfreude pieces.

It's understandable, given our society's preoccupation with money and materialism, but the truth is millions of American Idol fans can be wrong. A sizable audience is no warranty of quality.

Sometimes I worry the whole business of critical judgment is being disposed of in favor of a studio publicist-driven system that replaces authentic consideration with plot synopsis, gossip and speculation on the commercial prospects of a given film.

Part of this is due to the inherent newspaper bias toward the quantifiable and tangible. One of the reasons newspapers have always given such prominence to political campaigns is because there are winners and losers andspokesmen available to spin the events of the day for reporters. It's easier to write about polls and personalities than issues.

Any critic who seeks to write more about a film's content than context runs the risk of being labeled an elitist (which is exactly what a film critic should be - an expert who knows more about movies than the average bear). So you see more emphasis on box-office numbers, more snarky comments about actors' offscreen misadventures, more speculation on who could win what Oscar and less about the intrinsic mysteries of the art.

All that stuff is part of the rich and wacky world in which we live and it ought to be noticed by guys like me. But it shouldn't be the only stuff that gets noticed.

It would be nice if movies had more of a chance to build their audience, if so much didn't dependon the first couple of weekends. It would be nice if the cineplexes weren't dominated by crass, putative blockbusters designed to maximize profits. But things are as they are, and the best an honest critic can do is try to shed some light on smaller films that deserve to be seen and maybe make some interesting observations about the unavoidable spectacles that tie up most of the screens.

So I'll vote in this AP poll if they get it going. I'll be interested in seeing what makes the Top 10. But it might be more interesting to explore what's outside the consensus, the movies that show up unaccompanied by hype and are screened before scant audiences .

MovieStyle, Pages 37, 42 on 10/10/2008