Critics panel discusses modern film criticism and awards season trends

A panel explored the different ways journalists cover Hollywood during awards season in professor Mary Murphy’s “Entertainment, Business and Media in Today’s Society” class Monday in Wallis Annenberg Hall. For this session, Murphy enlisted three experienced members of the Broadcast Film Critics Association: Lisa Johnson-Mandell, David Freedman and Michael Ordoña.

The three brought a wealth of experience in show business — Ordoña and Johnson-Mandell are professional film critics, while Freedman was a producer on shows like PBS’ “Just Seen It” and Netflix’s “Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee.”

Murphy hosted the panel in connection with the coverage of Sunday’s 24th Critics’ Choice Awards, which Freedman helped produce. Additionally all three panelists had voted in these awards. In fact, Freedman started off the discussion by announcing that this had been the highest-rated show in five years, bucking a recent trend of declining viewership among all televised awards shows. Freedman contested that this was the result of a variety of factors, including the inclusion of host Taye Diggs and a long-awaited acceptance speech from Lady Gaga. But as a producer, he said that his job was not to analyze the reasons for its success, but rather to ensure that the ceremony itself is successfully executed.

Freedman  left the analysis to the panel’s full-time professional critics and the three discussed the pull of certain celebrities at awards shows, particularly the power celebrities considered “hot” or “in” at the time of the show. Johnson-Mendell and Ordoña said that this year’s Critics’ Choice Awards had no shortage of these celebrities, and it’s a big reason why the show had the success it did. Freedman agreed with his sentiment and attributed several of the night’s key moments to these celebrities.

“We have to have the heat, Gaga and Bradley,” Freedman said. “And Amy Adams, who was wonderful. She and Patricia Arquette shared the Best Actress award and it was our moment of zen.”

In discussing the Critics’ Choice Awards, the three also analyzed the phenomenon of a tie for a top award, which happened twice at Sunday’s award show. In the first instance, Adams and Arquette tied for Best Actress in a Limited Series or Movie Made For Television for their respective performances in “Sharp Objects” and “Escape at Dannemora.”

For the  Best Actress award, Glenn Close and Lady Gaga tied for their performances in “The Wife” and “A Star Is Born,” respectively. Johnson-Mandell argued that this occurrence is usually a very good thing for awards shows, as it affirms that one can and should recognize multiple brilliant performances.

“Ties — you can kind of see them coming … Support was totally widespread this year for a lot of actors as well as films,” Johnson-Mandell said. “There wasn’t one clear winner that was just a monster that just kind of took everything away.”

“When there’s a tie, you just kind of give it to the nominees. In my opinion, it makes the whole thing more fun — the more the merrier.”

Murphy then posed a question to her guests: What effect, if any, do early awards show results have on the Oscars?

Ordoña quickly chimed in with research he found while writing a statistical piece on this very subject. He started this piece when he became annoyed with different outlets commenting that the Golden Globes’ nominations and winners foreshadowed the Academy Awards. He argued that the member pools for the two awards shows are almost completely different, and any overlap of nominees is purely coincidental.

“There is no correlation between critics’ groups and the Oscars, which only makes sense because there’s no overlap,” Ordoña said. “Virtually none of us are in the Academy. Whereas the guilds — Directors’ Guild, the Producers’ Guild — they’re very good predictors.”

As the conversation came to a close, panelists discussed covering Hollywood as commentators or critics. Freedman expressed his frustration with social media and YouTube, which he believes have devalued professional criticism.

“[Criticism] does take a special skill, but the problem is that there’s just so much noise coming from 15-year-olds living in their mom’s basement in Iowa, and [they] get more hits than someone writing for the L.A. Times,” Freedman said.

Johnson-Mandell pushed back on this notion and insisted that such teenagers are simply doing what good content creators have always done: carving out their own niche. She recounted her own job of delivering quick film recommendations over the radio.

Ordoña finished the conversation by giving Murphy’s journalism students some advice for interviewing celebrities. After years of attending countless press junkets, he remarked that he has finally found a tactic that can work for even the toughest of interviewees.

“One thing that leads to a really fruitful interview is if you find the thing, first of all, that not everybody is talking about with [them], and also find the thing that [they] are interested in,” Ordoña said. “Of course your first interest is what’s going to be interesting to your reader.”