Awards Pundit Caught Cajoling For Special Access
When your job is access, you're eventually going to find yourself shouting "don't you know who I am??"
In the past few weeks I’ve written about the state of film criticism — chiefly about why it’s gotten so anodyne, and how the tiered system of access works (and contributes to it being anodyne). I honestly didn’t want keep banging on about “The State of Film Criticism” (just the thought of it makes me want to wedgy myself), but then this new piece dropped in Vanity Fair and it seemed too relevant to ignore.
In “Hollywood Media Is Abuzz With a Star Columnist’s Request for Priority Access,” Charlotte Klein writes about a mass email Scott Feinberg, Hollywood Reporter’s “executive editor of awards” wrote last week, addressed to “studios and strategists.” (PR people and their handlers, I imagine).
She quotes the email:
“As you plan the rollout of your film(s), I would like to respectfully ask that you not show films to any of my fellow awards pundits before you show them to me, even if that person represents himself or herself to you as (a) a potential reviewer of it, (b) needing to see the film in order to be part of decisions about covers, or (c) really anything else.”
“We feel that doing so is plainly unfair to THR, as it puts us at a competitive disadvantage, especially at film fests, where every second counts. […] It is not unreasonable to ask you to insist that someone is either an awards pundit or a critic/cover editor, but not both, at least during awards season.”
It goes on, but my first inclination was to dunk on an awards pundit for demanding, essentially, don’t show this to anyone else before me!
Can you believe the balls? (the presumed hubris angle was the general thrust of the article, and probably the reason the email recipients leaked it to a reporter in the first place). Feinberg also seems to be trying to draw a line between “awards pundit” and “critic” which feels, well, pretty rich. Like a demand for an incredibly high level of specialization in the writing-about-movies business. You talk about whether movies are *good!* I only talk about what *other* people are saying about whether movies are good!
Awards punditry is, unlike film criticism, something of a growth industry. It is, I imagine (and from most available evidence) easier to collect money from studios’ FYC (for your consideration) campaigns the more you convince them that you have your finger on the pulse of, or represent, the awards voter. Awards voters are who an FYC campaign is meant to sway, after all. Word on the street was, a lot of smaller sites once made their yearly nut entirely on FYC campaign money.
Yet while I understand “awards coverage” as a business strategy, it’s slightly infuriating to me as a movie lover — focusing entirely on “many people are saying” rather than expressing your own opinions in a discussion of their merits.
It’s the movie equivalent of the way so much political coverage has turned into horserace reports, making it all about polls and “who can win!” and “who is electable?!” rather than discussing the actual candidates, their policies, and how those policies might actually work (only in this case, with even less nutritional value). Have you ever read one of those Anonymous Awards Voter articles they have every year? Imagine your job was trying to predict the tastes of those desiccated showbiz grandpas? Kill me. (There also seems to be a weird overlap between awards punditry and work on political campaigns, which is actually maybe more apt than weird).
What was I saying? Oh yeah, my first inclination was to dunk. But clearly I’m above that. Anyway, then I realized that what he was asking for, albeit in a different way, was to just… show the films to all press in one wave, and to end the weird, tiered system that I’ve already complained about — whereby cozier “journalists” (critics, writers, influencers, pundits, whatever you want to call them) get access sooner. This is, again, something that really only matters because of the outsized importance we’ve placed on aggregator scores, which are wildly misinterpreted in the first place. Phew. It’s so dumb and petty that all this happens at all that it makes it feel dumb and petty to complain about it. In that sense, I commiserate.
In the email, he went on to imply that there would be repercussions for studios that continued to widely distribute invitations to screenings, and that “moving forward, [THR] may take that into consideration during the booking of roundtables, podcasts, and other coverage,” he wrote, referring to the sought-after spots on the outlet’s celebrity-fueled discussion series. Sources who saw the email—which I’m told went out widely and has since circulated even further—found it either a faintly absurd attempt to get ahead of his competitors or an implied threat that they had to take seriously.
In essence, Feinberg is demanding access by threatening the access merchants in the language they understand: access. When you play the don’t you know who I am? game long enough (either enthusiastically or reluctantly), eventually you’re going to find yourself demanding don’t you know who I am?!
Anyway, I guess I felt compelled to write about this subject again partly because it’s funny (there’s been a disruption in the circle jerk!), and partly because it highlights the difficulties inherent in getting any independent coverage on any subject that requires such cozy relationships between writers and the industries they cover. Naturally this phenomenon extends far beyond entertainment, as most entertainment phenomena do.
Being able to control the narrative by only releasing information to the friendliest outlets only works in an industry where that’s standard practice, and where the leaders are hyper-consolidated. That’s not only ever more true of the studios and streamers, but of the outlets that cover them (Feinberg’s outlet, Hollywood Reporter, also shares a parent company two of the other main trades, Variety and Deadline—Penske, who also own Indiewire and Rolling Stone).
As Dickinson creator Alena Smith wrote in a must-read piece for The Ankler this week:
We need a political coalition to break up the studio-streamers, or we will lose the ability to sustain the TV and film industry that has been the beating heart of our culture for over a hundred years. We need structural separation to better distinguish and disintegrate the internally-conflicted businesses of production and distribution. We need to make the entertainment industry genuinely competitive again, and stop this one-way slide towards monopoly and monopsony. And we need this now, while there is still an industry of highly-skilled craftspeople to save.
Yep.
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Other stuff:
-New Pod Yourself The Wire! Jack O’Brien from The Daily Zeitgeist returns to talk about The Wire season three, episode 12: “Mission Accomplished.”
-New Frotcast! America’s #1 handsome boi Joey Avery (now on tour!) returns to the Frotquarters to talk about Barbie, Hollywood learning all the wrong lessons from Barbie, me challenging Zuck and Elon to a fight, and help brainstorm our idea for McDonald’s: The Movie.
-I was watching Blackbird on AppleTV last night (still only halfway through episode 1, do not spoil it for me) and realized that Taron Egerton is the Chav Tom Holland. I believe this is the UK’s version of Matt Damon/Jesse Plemons. Discuss.
