Is professional criticism dead? - Has the internet age invalidated the need for professional opinions on media?

[King Ghidorah]

In this day and age word of mouth is as spreadable an accessible as its ever been social media is used by a massive portion of people across the world and you can find out basically anything about a piece of media within a day of it being released and sometimes even before it's been released
With all that in mind is professional criticism meaningful or neccessary anymore in this day and age? With critic and audience opinions seemingly being more divided by the day and the more common knowledge of the incestuous and insular nature of the movie industry is, including effectively legally bribing/blackmailing "influencers" into giving positive word of mouth lest ye be blacklisted from all future important media events
Even looking back at the opinions expressed by people like Roger Ebert, a man upheld as a bastion of movie critics by so many people makes me question if they had any value to begin with
What is your opinion on the matter fellow kiwis?

 

[Pampered Degenerate]

What's needed is trust worthy, authoritative reviews. While those qualities used to be synonymous with professionalism, being a professional increasingly means just being a paid shill.

 

[Justtocheck]

You should really read Susan's Sontag essay "Against interpretation". It focuses on books mainly, but it also mentions movies. Written in 1964, it's pretty incredible how most of it could be meant to said it's from 2019. It answers your exact same question.

Edit: Let me post the ending quote of the essay, becuase it's cool

What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to seemore, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all. The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art-and, by analogy, our own experience-more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means. In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.

 

[TFT-A9]

I don't think I've ever given that much of a shit about "professional critics", barring when it's obvious pay-for-play crap and they insist on still calling themselves "critics" instead of "whores"

 

[ZombiefiedFerret]

Since when was professional film criticism meaningful or necessary? lol They've always been a bunch of shills.

 

[King Ghidorah]

Since when was professional film criticism meaningful or necessary? lol They've always been a bunch of shills.

I'd argue that criticism was typically considered a more dignified position in the pre internet age where they were considered something of a high authority before any schlub could start a blog and call themselves a critic

 

[Dom Cruise]

Professional film criticism died with Ghostbusters 2016, that's when they threw out all notions of objectivity in favor of running interference for a shitty movie for political reasons.

Criticism is now, like so many things, just another avenue for political propaganda.

 

[BrunoMattei]

Professional film criticism died with Ghostbusters 2016, that's when they threw out all notions of objectivity in favor of running interference for a shitty movie for political reasons.

Criticism is now, like so many things, just another avenue for political propaganda.

That's been a thing since forever. The bias is just more blatant now.

 

[Rebel Wilson]

When critics were beholden to the newspapers that employed them they had some autonomy since they stayed away from criticizing car dealerships, real estate agents and other advertisers in their papers. Now that print media is dead critics can only rely on page views or advertising, which due to advertising algorithms, the films/games they are reviewing are the same ones showing up as ads on their websites. So they better get on their knees.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

In general it's always best to find a person with similar tastes to you and follow his advices.
Anyways, professional critics have burned out every spec of goodwill people had to them when a good chunk of them decided to endorse objectively bad movies in favour of politics. Furthermore, sites like Rotten Tomatoes only made shilling worse since you now turned film review into a binary good/bad that doesn't allow any middle ground.

 

[Idiotron]

Not in the slightest, professional critics are all over the place.
It's just that they're mostly independent because, in the internet age, you don't need to work with a newspaper or a TV station.
What do you think people like Chris Stuckman or Angry Joe are?
These dudes not only make a ton of money criticizing things but their takes on things can actually make a difference in the profits of the things they're criticizing.

 

[ScamL Likely]

I'd argue that criticism was typically considered a more dignified position in the pre internet age where they were considered something of a high authority before any schlub could start a blog and call themselves a critic

Only by critics themselves. The vast majority of them were always seen as wankers or shills by anyone who didn't passively absorb their reviews.

 

[Dark Emporer Dood]

"With all that in mind is professional criticism meaningful or neccessary anymore in this day and age?"

No, and I'd argue that its never really been necessary. I'm not a fan of holding award ceremonies every time Disney+Max releases a new movie, or praising a videogame because it has a familiar brand name on it. It just needlessly separates the common man and the media world. Most "professional" critics don't have the burden of actually paying for their goods, nor do they have to live with their goods if we're talking appliances. Your friends and family are better critics than a talking box on youtube.

 

[Kosher Dill]

Even in their heyday, critics were only a way to hear the film-school take on a movie. They were useless for knowing if a new movie would be fun.

 

[Syaoran Li]

Professional film criticism died with Ghostbusters 2016, that's when they threw out all notions of objectivity in favor of running interference for a shitty movie for political reasons.

Criticism is now, like so many things, just another avenue for political propaganda.

Film criticism pretty much died when Roger Ebert did, but the Ghostbusters 2016 thing was probably one of the first big examples of this disparity effecting blockbusters and genre movies in a really obvious way.

Most critics always preferred pretentious arthouse films and "Oscar Bait" dramas over genre films but the jarring interference that so many critics ran for a dumb Ghostbusters reboot got a lot of people looking at how retarded the whole thing was.

Either Ghostbusters 2016 or Joker would probably be the point where everyone and their mother fully knew that professional paid criticism was totally dead. The uproar over Birds of Prey and Sonic at the start of the year were just the dead horse finally becoming a skeleton.

There's also similar shit with the Academy Awards like Parasite winning Best Picture, but that was already a problem before. Parasite was for the 2010's what Shakespeare In Love was for the 1990's and Crash was for the 2000's.

 

[Gravityqueen4life]

"professional critics" are all shills and sell-outs.

 

[Dom Cruise]

Film criticism pretty much died when Roger Ebert did,

In a way yes, it died with Ebert, but have you ever heard of the AV Club? Their original staff left to create a new site called The Dissolve in 2013 and that was some high quality fucking film criticism, go back and read the archives of that site.

But then The Dissolve died in 2015 and the new staff at the AV Club ran interference for Ghostbusters the following year and that was that, The Dissolve was the last gasp for good film criticism.

 

[King Ghidorah]

Film criticism pretty much died when Roger Ebert did,

Tbh listening to some of Ebert's takes I find that questionable even

 

[Syaoran Li]

Tbh listening to some of Ebert's takes I find that questionable even

True, Ebert had his share of faux pas and blinding hot takes (his infamous comments on video games being a more well-known one) but he was also a lot better than every other critic of the time. Most of the other big critics were either artsy snobs who were the Boomer equivalent of Cole Smithey or they were transparently paid shills who gave everything a good review like Gene Shallit.

Ebert even liked a lot of genre movies if they were really well-made or well-written while every other critic at the time just panned them on principle without even looking.

 

[Absolutego]

Criticism/entertainment reviews still have a place in terms of aiding customers in purchase decisions, but the ones who do it correctly instead of substituting it for wannabe academic "critiques" are few and far between.

The kind of sphere professional criticism used to inhabit involved explaining broad elements of a work and suggesting which parts may appeal to which kinds of taste. The critic obviously had personal biases, but good ones were upfront about those biases and would try to point out elements they personally disliked if it appealed to a demographic besides them. Take Half in the Bag by Red Letter Media as an example; how often have your heard Mike or Jay outline what kinds of people they think a film would appeal to, even if ultimately they personally give negative recommendations? Good criticism is about empowering the consumer to make a better informed choice.

Unfortunately that's been widely discarded in favor of "X/Y thing you know is AWESOME or TERRIBLE"-style criticism that plays better for social media clicks. This is true even with Half in the Bag, sadly, where their most popular reviews, by far, are them shitting on widely disliked movies.