Film Critics Aren’t Snooty Enough, Says Scott Foundas

In sharp counterpoint to Richard Corliss, who thinks that critics need to get off their high horses and start giving awards to movies that make a lot of money, Scott Foundas is proud of his critics’ association and its elitism. The L.A. Weekly reviewer, in fact, obliquely calls out other film critics’ awards for not being as discerning as Foundas’s Los Angeles Film Critics Association, who gave their Best Picture prize to Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood this weekend:

There are great films (like No Country For Old Men) and then there are films that send shock waves through the very landscape of cinema, that instantly stake a claim on a place in the canon. Often, such vanguard works fail to be fully understood or appreciated at the moment they first appear, as some of the initial reviews that greeted Psycho, 2001 and Bonnie and Clyde attest. There Will Be Blood belongs in their company, and I consider myself fortunate to belong to a group with the foresight to recognize it in its own moment.

Snap! Take that, unsuitably elitist New York film critics! Your movie was only great! Sure, Foundas wrote this before the New York critics voted, but we still think there’s some snappage here.

To Everything There Is a Season [LA Weekly]
Earlier: Film Critics Are Too Snooty, Says Richard Corliss