#rottentomatoes

           Everybody loves to hate on the Oscars. There’s good reason for that, and I certainly have my share of anger at the institution’s methods, but I don’t really want to talk about that today. I could gripe about DiCaprio’s Oscarlessness, or rant about Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close getting nominated for best picture, but I want to be a little more academic here for a minute. But full disclosure, I also think the Oscars are bunk.

           That’s out of the way, now let’s focus on how and why. We could argue who deserves what award for days on end, but that’s not getting us anywhere. The problem I’d like to address is the fallacy of lumping all film together as if it were a graduating class, and ranking it on a single scale. It’s not just the Oscars that are guilty of this. Award shows in general, and even aggregate score sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes perpetuate this trend. You could have loved The Expendables more than any other film you saw in 2010, but we all the Academy likely wouldn’t even acknowledge its existence. The Expendables was never going to contend with The King’s Speech for best picture, but that’s not because it wasn’t as good of a film. I’m not arguing that The Expendables is on equal footing with The King’s Speech, quite the opposite. I’m saying that the two films are on such drasticallydifferent footing that they shouldn’t even be considered together. You can’t say The King’s Speech is the better film any more than you can say that Expendables is. The two exist in two completely separate areas of cinema, but the Academy treats them as if they don’t, and that’s the real problem.

           Here’s another example: you’re trying to decide what movie to watch on Netflix so you go and browse some titles on Rotten Tomatoes. Just because Titanicbeats out The Boondock Saints 88% to 20% doesn’t mean that’s clearly the one to watch. Again, I’m not arguing that a dumb action romp about Irish brothers murdering criminals in Boston is a better film than a soulful tale of love and loss. I’m arguing that those two descriptions aren’t of things that can be counted against each other.

           Obviously there are manners of exception here. If you’ve read this far you’ll probably agree that Mall Cop 2 is a steaming pile of rotting trash and deserves its 6% on Rotten Tomatoes. But the 47% of viewers who rated it “fresh” likely don’t give a rat’s ass that they just watched a rat’s ass. It’s easy to dismiss opinions like those, but are they any less valid than the opinion that The Artist was the best film of 2011? At the end of the day, a movie need only accomplish what it set out to do. Are there better comedies than Mall Cop 2? Obviously. But that is the field on which it must be judged, not against the entirety of film itself.

           In the case of Mall Cop, there is merit to the aggregate score system. And we should all praise the heavens it will never appear at the Oscars. These institutions do serve a purpose: recognition is important and general assessments can be helpful. But for my money, there is far too much weight attached to these rulings. I’m not calling for abolition of all film assessment, I’m appealing for a more individualized take where every film can be appreciated for what it achieved, not ridiculed for what it didn’t even attempt. George C Scott, after multiple Oscar nominations in years prior, turned down Best Actor in a Leading Role in 1970 because he didn’t believe any one performance could be counted above another as every role and every film is different in its pursuit. Was Patton a better movie than Mall Cop? I could say yes, duh, that’s not even a question, but that would be missing Scott’s point. We need to evaluate every film on its own merit, even rancid garbage from Kevin James.