Speaking of which: White is often blasted as a critic who doesn't believe half the things he writes, and intentionally goes against the critical grain to garner attention for himself. This claim is belied by the NYFCC's own evidence. Yes, McQueen may have jeered McQueen's nod as Best Director. But "American Hustle", the group's choice for best film, is one that White praised highly.
And as a commenter on the Hollywood Reporter's story about the brouhaha pointed out, it's not as if White's list of canonical films is absurd, or even terribly adventurous.
Here is the contrarian White's Top 10 list from the 2012 Sight & Sound poll:
"L'Avventura'" (1960) Michelangelo Antonioni
"Intolerance" (1916) D.W. Griffith
"Jules et Jim" (1962) François Truffaut
"Lawrence of Arabia" (1962) David Lean
"Lola" (1961) Jacques Demy
"Magnificent Ambersons, The" (1942) Orson Welles
"Nashville" (1975) Robert Altman
"Nouvelle Vague" (1990) Jean-Luc Godard
"The Passion of Joan of Arc" (1927) Carl Theodor Dreyer
"Sansho Dayu" (1954) Mizoguchi Kenji
We can quibble over lists, and critics make entire careers out of doing such things, but White's canon seems respectful and mainstream enough to my eyes. Antonioni, Dreyer, Mizoguchi, Godard, Truffaut, Welles—these aren't outré choices. Even if they were, are we seriously claiming White as a knee-jerk contrarian because he dared to dislike "12 Years a Slave", and to (allegedly) say so publicly? Or because he goes against the number-crunching at Metacritic?
Again, are we actually adults here?
I know, I know. The knee-jerk to White's knee-jerk is that he (gasp!) actually likes Michael Bay's cinema, especially "Transformers". And, yeah, I think that franchise is crappy, too. But he's entitled to think otherwise, and we shouldn't dismiss White's entire critical oeuvre just because he likes a guy whose reputation is being rehabilitated as the vanguard of "vulgar auteurism," anyway. If we can still anoint Roger Ebert as a critical saint after giving three stars to "Tomb Raider" none to Alex Cox's "Walker" (a film that’s now part of the Criterion Collection), then perhaps we should let White own a few outlying opinions without relegating him to the dustbin.
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