Anyway, they were answering fantasy baseball questions posed by listeners who had left them five-star reviews on Apple podcasts. You couldn't leave a lesser review and still expect to have your question read on air. They acknowledged it was an "I scratch your back, you scratch mine" situation.
One of the two, the analyst I like best, was pushing back a little bit about it, especially when they were talking about some people who had submitted questions but had only left three-star reviews. He thought that three stars should be the starting point, and as we all know from movie reviews, three out of five means you definitely like the movie more than you dislike it. But in the cutthroat world where total podcast rating determines your visibility among other podcasts, three stars doesn't cut it. (There was a great Black Mirror episode about this phenomenon also.)
He went on to say that when they'd recently had renovations done on their home, he had to review the company who had done the renovations, on a scale of 1 to 10. They told him that anything less than a 10 they would treat like a 1. So he gave them 10 on everything.
I've used Uber as an example in the subject of this post, mostly because it's easily translatable and resonant with anyone who's ever used an Uber. You know that if you give an Uber driver anything less than five stars, it's like you've stabbed him (or her) in the heart and potentially taken food out of his (or her) kids' mouths. Which is how you get ridiculous statistics like an Uber driver with 5,286 rides and a average rating of 4.94. (And curses to those who cut into the perfect 5.)
Are movie reviews the last bastion of pure honesty in our society?
I suppose a pass/fail grade -- which is effectively what a five stars/any other rating system is -- has been in place with movies for years, if you consider Siskel & Ebert's thumbs up/thumbs down system. But Siskel & Ebert provided the nuance with the way they spoke about a film on their show, and of course when Roger wrote in print, he used star ratings. Rating an Uber driver lacks that kind of nuance, and if you ever encountered a system of rating movies that gave either a yes or no without any explanation for that judgment, you would reject it outright. (Rotten Tomatoes is effectively a composite of that, but you can drill down if you want to find the nuance, and the total percentage effectively comes out to a star rating anyway.)
When we are giving star ratings for movies, we aren't beholden to anyone whose children need feeding. In fact, almost without exception, the people we're grading are very well off. That's not to say they might not have gotten themselves into some debt from living beyond their means, but they started from a place of at least some money, all but the most poor independent filmmakers out there. And really, in most cases, we wouldn't even know.
It's a lot easier to imagine yourself ruining the life of an Uber driver. Plus, there are no larger consequences to giving out the highest grade. There's no equivalent of directing someone to a mediocre movie by giving it five stars. If you thought you were putting someone in the backseat of an unsafe driver, well, you might be inclined to withhold your highest rating for that driver anyway. We had one situation like that, which my wife and I still talk about, though I think the likeliest thing was that we did give him five stars.
Plus with a movie review you don't have the immediacy of looking the person you're rating in the eye -- or at least in the back of the head.
But let's say we did think that, as critics. Let's say we did give five stars to almost every movie. The entire industry would be lost. We'd be gone from our jobs within two weeks. And no one would have any reason to choose any movie over any other movie except whether they liked the subject matter or the stars.
Wait a minute ... is that how it is now anyway?
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