Grading the Graders: Movie Ratings Sites and the Oscar Contenders

I love movie reviews -- which is why a key perk of my day is plopping down in any given Newsweek critic's office and getting the scoop on what's out. "Revolutionary Road: riff."  Their opinions almost never overlap ("Road" was, varyingly, "uggghhh-two-hours-of-fighting" and "mesmerizing"), but the lack of consensus only makes me want to see a film more.

Which is why I read with interest the Wall Street Journal's thoughtful piece last Friday about online movie ratings -- specifically, the knee-jerk reaction of print movie critics when they see their reviews turned into a number.  It's well known that Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes compress critical musings -- tally what of Roger Ebert's thumbs are up -- to limited success and sometimes hilarious results.  (How could you quantify something like A.O. Scott's delicious send-up of "Mamma Mia," equal parts vitriol and generosity, and my favorite review of the year?) As the WSJ writer more bluntly puts it, "A movie that pleases everyone but thrills no one thus can beat out a polarizing masterpiece."  True to form: right now on both sites, palatable pap like "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa" wallops Kate Winslet's elegiac, Oscar-nominated turn in the Oscar-nominated "The Reader," which itself earns a D-minus equivalent (RT) and an F equivalent (MC).

These sites haven't yet started to account for the very purposeful way that today's consumer attends movies.  In the age of On Demand, DVR, Netflix and Hulu, those who go and pay their $15 are looking to be pleased or challenged in a very specific, niche way.  What average filmgoer is really crossreferencing the evals for "Marley & Me" against French film "The Class," looking for an expression of each film's merits in like terms? And by the same, like-term token -- by branding "Revolutionary Road" as two-thirds of a good movie -- we're bound to accept that a fusion of "Corky Romano" (20) to "Frost/Nixon" (80) would yield "The Godfather" (100).

Both sites also cull from the reviews of many mainstream critics, with Metacritic weighting the scores of more important voices, and Rotten Tomatoes separating out the elite reviewers into a "Top Critics" tab.  But they can be surprisingly different in what grades they assign. The following are a handful of films nominated for major Academy Awards -- acting, writing, director and best picture, among others -- and how they fared on the two sites:

Nominated for Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress.  on Metacritic, on Rotten Tomatoes. (Wow.)

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actress.  on Metacritic; on Rotten Tomatoes.  "Zach and Miri Make a Porno," in which a climactic scene involves feces splattering the face of a cameraman).

"  Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay.  on Metacritic.  on Rotten Tomatoes. (That's "generally favorable" at MC to "certified fresh" at RT).

Nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay.  on Metacritic, on Rotten Tomatoes. (

on Metacritic; on Rotten Tomatoes.

 What do you think?