It happens like clockwork every year. A film comes out of a festival sitting on a cloud boosted by the word of critics that are left speechless post screenings. The filmmakers receive standing ovations, Oscar pundits run off to their hotel rooms to write their four star reviews, and the film itself is placed front and center in movie discussions for weeks. Things look very good for that film, but then a few months later the knives come out.
Glowing reviews from August and September turn into vitriolic pissing contests where anything nice said is redacted or erased. Discussions like this just don’t make sense on an objective level, movies are an art form and deserve to be measured on their own strengths and weaknesses. Oscar backlash is hardly a new trend, yet it seems to have gotten more publicized and nastier in recent years.
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