For someone like me, who is sort of the “next gen” of movie critic/blogger, watching those that we admired for so long be put out to pasture is like finding out there is no Santa Claus. Owen Gleiberman has been an Entertainment Weekly critic since I was a kid. Since I started getting a subscription to Entertainment Weekly for my birthday, long before the internet made it easy to find other critics and other reviews. When I was a kid, Entertainment Weekly was basically a semi-serious magazine about movies. A lot of snark has come with it more recently, but 90′s versions of EW reported movie news for those of us who lived outside of Hollywood.
And Owen Gleiberman told us which movies we should and shouldn’t care about. Aside from the films critics are never supposed to like (Adam Sandler movies), Gleiberman has been pretty spot on in what he liked versus what I liked. I realized then that I respected his opinion, as it often matched my own.
Now, Entertainment Weekly has decided that Owen Gleiberman is no longer in their current vision for the future of their website. I respect Chris Nashawaty as a film critic, but I don’t have that same respect that I did for Gleiberman. I didn’t grow up reading Nashawaty. And who the fuck are these other people? Adam Markovitz? Marc Snetiker? Joe McGovern? Did EW decide to replace one of the most well known and well respected film critics with three random people off the street?
Movie critics take time to get respect from their audience. People have to find a critic they typically agree with, and then check out their reviews on films. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you have a handful of trusted critics. I’m just now starting to pay attention to Nashawaty, it’ll take me years to give a fuck what the other three are thinking.
So it begs the question… why would Entertainment Weekly kick their most respected and most trusted source to the curb? Do they not want to be read anymore? Do they no longer value “name” writers? If they think they can just sneak three random critics in, and no one will notice, they are sorely mistaken. I’ll just follow Gleiberman to whatever news source he writes for next, because he’s my critic. He always has been.
On a side note, EW also axed Annie Barrett, and while she hasn’t been around as long as Gleiberman, she’s still Annie Freaking Barrett, and I’ve read her columns for years now. She’s one of my favorite entertainment writers, and this should also be a devastating blow to EW.
I’m so disappointed with Entertainment Weekly.