Martin Scorsese criticized Rotten Tomatoes and CinemaScore as well as the “devaluation of cinema” itself during his acceptance speech for the inaugural Robert Osborne Award at the Turner Classic Movies film festival.
Scorsese honed in on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes and movie-appeal measuring service CinemaScore, according to Entertainment Weekly, .
“The horrible idea they reinforce [is] that every picture, every image is there to be instantly judged and dismissed without giving audiences time to see it,” he said. “Time to see it, maybe ruminate and maybe make a decision for themselves. So the great 20th-century art form, the American art form, is reduced to content.”
Scorsese said the word “content” poses a big problem in Hollywood as it groups together a “picture, you’ve got a TV episode, a new trailer, you’ve got a how-to video on a coffee-maker, you’ve got a Super Bowl commercial, you’ve got ‘Lawrence of Arabia,’ it’s all the same.”
He added, “They can also turn a picture off and go straight to the next piece of content. If there’s no sense of value tied to a given movie, of course, it can be sampled in bits and pieces and just forgotten.”
The filmmaker then concluded, “You know the difference between a YouTube video and the great American art form. You react against the devaluation of cinema and movies by showing up.”
Leonardo DiCaprio presented the inaugural award to Scorsese at the Chinese Theater in Hollywood last week.
Scorsese has been vocal about championing the traditional theatrical distribution method over seeing movies on streaming websites such as Netflix. However, his next film, “The Irishman,” will debut on Netflix next year.
A spokesperson for Rotten Tomatoes had no comment.
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