Sasha Stone
November 11, 2021
Awards Daily
I had a dream that I got to work with the director David Fincher. Turns out, it wasn’t a dream.
How did this good fortune ever shine upon me, you might wonder? Most of you know me as an Oscar watcher, or one of the bad seeds that birthed this industry back in 1999. Really, writing about the Oscars was a way to write about movies. I’d grown up living in movies and practically living in movie theaters. But it wasn’t just in theaters or at drive-ins. I would watch movies on our rabbit-eared TVs whenever they came on. Back in the day you had to watch them when they aired because we did not have VCRs. We did not have cable. In the early days, we didn’t even have remote controls. But we had movies and we had movies that played on television. Usually these were black-and-whites, but they were as great as movies always have been and always will be.
I had dropped out of film school in 1993, landed online in 1994, and spent the next five years thinking and writing about movies in a Usenet group intensely devoted to cinema. That was where I first got into David Fincher’s films. I started this site as a way to fuse my own love of movies with whatever the Oscars were. I came from a place of loving MOVIES, not loving the Oscars.
Of course, I had not yet met David Fincher when I first started writing about his work. And he would have had no way of knowing that I’d made much of my own reputation online by writing about him, specifically The Social Network. We finally met after he read my review of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. When I told him I’d seen The Social Network 30 times and declared it a perfect film, he told me I was insane.
Since 2011, a lot has changed about movies and the way they are covered. There’s been an ongoing lament that film criticism, such as it is, had supplanted the pure love of film. The Oscar business, my business, seemed to directly impact that trajectory. Does the Oscar industry do more harm than good? If everyone is aiming for those nominations, and in order to get those nominations the movies must deliver what the Oscar voters want — does that create a kind of chokehold that empties out LOVE of movies?
The Fincher Analyst 