I think I really need to flag this Steve Shives video up today, as it’s one of the most articulate and interesting pieces of analysis I’ve found on Youtube in a while. In it, Shives starts to explore star ratings and how, in reacting to anything both online and off, we’re now encourage to give five star ratings to anything we encounter. Such ratings have become a kind of currency: particularly in America, people now feel socially obliged to give the highest rating to everything whether they liked it or not, rather like tipping. As Shives says, such ratings have thus become meaningless in assessing how good something is.

This can be applied to anything, including film of course. These days, films are often assessed and compared via the number of stars they have, especially online. Numerous film review websites use such ratings to rank films currently in cinemas. The problem is, such stars are usually not awarded using any objective criteria. Shives has an issue with the principal that someone can actively dislike a film, but still award it five stars for various other reasons – perhaps to keep a particular actor or director high in the rankings. Yet that reminds me of my work on cinephilia: should we try to judge films based on some form of objective criteria, or should we go with our subjective opinions, or try to use both? If we rank films based on a set of externally mandated criteria, then in theory it would be possible to award a film a maximum rating, even though a reviewer may dislike the film overall. Yet would that not still make a nonsense of such ratings? Doesn’t a reviewer, by definition, have to like a film to award it a maximum score?

I’m still intrigued by all this. Shives goes into far more detail in his film, and it’s well worth watching. It’s a great example of how articulate and nuanced this form of online video discourse is becoming, seemingly picking up upon debates found in film journals, and taking them in fascinating new directions