Expert Opinions & The Academy
I’d like to believe that experts know what they are doing — at least most of the time. If I didn’t convince myself of this, I’d feel really scared going to the doctor’s office. But I feel like I’m putting too much faith in expertise writ large. Do experts really know how to assess broader circumstances, or has their expertise narrowed their field of view?
Note: there is plenty of evidence that suggests doctors are quite fallible, but a tendency toward denial precludes me from integrating this into my representation of the world.
To embark on an exploration of this question, I’d like to consider Oscar nominees for Best Picture. There are always so many, yet year after year I’ve never heard of any of them. Is this a feature or a bug of the process? (The feature/bug sentence structure is a useful linguistic cartwheel to justify a mistake).
I think it is a massive bug. Best Picture nominees only appeal to The Academy, a group of movie insiders (read: fanatics) that watches cinema in a completely different fashion than the average Joe/Jane (a subset of the population of which I am a part). I watch for entertainment value, waiting for comic punches and cringy moments, action scenes and heartwarming endings. The Academy watches for cinematography (whatever that means), dialogue, and skill. They assess it as an art form. I assess it as a binary question: were the last two hours enjoyable?
No lay person wants to watch an art form on a Friday night after a grueling week of getting their labor exploited. True red-blooded Americans want to sit back in their La-Z-Boy with a Bud Light (Light to watch the calories) and enjoy a movie night with the family. Meanwhile, the Academy is imposing their strict domain-specific preferences on us with no regard for true entertainment value. Martin Scorsese criticizing Marvel movies — the greatest sequence of box office hits ever — is the epitome of this ivory-towered take on what comprises true cinema.
This is partly why Oscar success has correlated less and less with box office success over the last few decades. Consider the last few winners: Birdman, Spotlight, Moonlight, The Shape of Water, Green Book, Parasite, and…Nomadland. Other than the absolutely phenomenal and thrilling experience that was Parasite, none of these movies are particularly entertaining. They are movies that I would (pretend to) watch if I were in a film class. Watching them would feel like work. This is why the Academy’s preference for them makes sense. Their job is to judge on what appears to be the most work, not what is the most entertaining. That’s the crux of the issue: a division between expert and public opinion.
This issue is not limited to movies, though it may be a particularly germane example (after looking up germane, it appears that I have introduced a circularity). Academia can get bogged down by the pursuit of stronger h-indices and conference talks instead of understanding broader consequences of research. High-minded economists think they are changing the world by running some regressions, but then they go to a party with real people and get asked about what stocks to buy (this is a true story that was given as the intro to a class). I bet GME and Dogecoin really screw with this guy’s head. In 2016, all the political pundits thought the public would care about this event or that gaffe but most people just…didn’t care.
So, what’s the conclusion to the piece? I’m not sure, but certainly there’s something there.
I’ll admit that this post is primarily motivated from the 52 minutes I spent attempting to watch the excruciatingly boring movie Nomadland. Literally nothing happened. My roommate and I got so upset. I’d like to thank the Academy for a massive waste of my time. We called it a sunk cost (blog post forthcoming…maybe) and have never looked back.
