I used to be a movie critic so I don’t take much of what they say to heart.

Nor do I care that much about what the now ex-public servant George Santos, the self-proclaimed Mary Magdalene of Congress, has to say about anything.

But first, let’s talk about the critics.  We’ll get to Mary, I mean, George, in a few moments.

My former colleague and fellow critic at Daily Variety, Jim Harwood, summed it up best years ago when some outraged stranger asked him pointedly what qualified HIM to be a movie critic.

Harwood tartly replied:

Because I have an opinion and a place to print it.

That’s about all there is to it. 

In fact, it’s so perfectly succinct, I’ve told that anecdote many times before and written it about it several times here.

Then why was I so outraged with the New York Film Critics Association this week when they announced their awards for 2023? 

Even more outraged than I was about Santos, the 35 year-old (maybe?), Botox using at the expense of his campaign contributors (Note:  Seriously, how many lines could she possibly have?), the entire time he was in Congress.

Well, I’ll tell you.

I’ve seen thousands of movies over the years and can count on less than ten fingers the number of times I’ve walked out of a theatre before a film is over.  As bad as something might be, it just doesn’t seem right to not give the filmmakers their due and view what they’ve turned out to the bitter end.

This is unlike watching a Congressional hearing on cable news where the very nature of the questions and comments simply beg you to turn them off.

It’s difficult to make a movie, even one that doesn’t work for you.  But it’s pretty simple to stage a House or Senate committee hearing where you can manage to bore and/or offend just about anyone in record time and get them to leave.

Nevertheless, I made an exception to my longstanding rule of not walking out on a movie if I could help it this summer at Outfest, the LGBTQ film festival, because the lead performance in one film was so simultaneously grating, flat, whiny and, well, amateurish, that it took me out of the story, not to mention the performances of all the other capable actors, and literally made me cringe.

Repeatedly.

Even more than Santos calling himself Mary Magdalene, which is really saying something significant, a practice George seldom indulges in.

Anyway, I whispered half-an-hour in to the friend who took me to this film if he thought this lead actor wasn’t just god-awful.  To which he whispered back, yeah, he’s not very good.  And we kept watching the movie.

But with each line of dialogue and every outrageous scene after another he appeared in, this actor made me want to climb the walls.  It was like the worst line readings of every bit of dialogue I and every writer friend of mine had ever written were all strung together and projected in 35mm in one endless loop for eternity. 

Not as blithely silly as George nor as starkly offensive and obnoxious as George’s choice for president, Donald Trump, but equally as nails on a blackboard bad.

Finally, with less than twenty minutes to go in the film, I blurted out to my friend that I was leaving.

Really?  It’s almost over.

I can’t do it, I replied.  I can’t stay here one minute longer.  Not one second longer.

At which point, I got up and walked as unobtrusively as I could up the aisle and out the door, praying I wouldn’t run into the filmmaker or, even worse, that actor.

Unlike George and his MAGA clan, I had no interest in making this a thing, a media worthy meme or even a slightly hurtful, tone deaf personal encounter.

As you might have googled by now, the actor is Franz Rogowski, and for his work in Ira Sachs’ Passages he was this week named best actor of the year by the New York Film Critics Association.

Better than Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer.

Better than Bradley Cooper in Maestro.

Better than Colman Domingo in Rustin.

Even better than Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers, Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction, Barry Keoghan in Saltburn, Andrew Scott in All Of Us Strangers, Teo Yoo in Past Lives or Leonardo DiCaprio in Killers of the Flower Moon, the latter NYFCA’s choice for best film of the year.

Having already seen many of the above films and read glowing notices on the remaining handful, I can’t fathom in a thousand George Santos-es how the New York critics made their choice in that category this year.

Perhaps it has to do with attention-getting or simply standing out from the crowd, never good reasoning for a critical determination but certainly the point at which the Carousel of American Regression that is Santos comes in.

It seems these days being outrageously untruthful and different from everyone else is enough to make you a popular winner.  At least temporarily. 

I mean, Santos defrauded his voters by lying about where he went to school and his business experience all the while spending their hard-earned money on designer clothes and paying off his credits card debts as he passed himself off as Jewish (Note: Later stating he really only meant he was Jew-ish, aka like being a little bit pregnant-ish) and claimed that his mother had died  on 9/11 at the World Trade Center’s South Tower when all the while she was living in her native Brazil, alone and very far away from her soon to be quite infamous son.

Though I might argue vociferously with Mr. Rogowski being the recipient of his award, at the end of the day we all know this is just merely a matter of opinion. 

But George “Mary Magdalene” Santos, Donald “Orange Jesus” Trump and everyone else in the entire MAGA brood, should be made to face all of the legal and moral consequences their performative behaviors have wrought in these last several years, entertaining as they might seem to some audiences.

Most certainly, they should not be awarded anything for them.  Or rewarded in any way, shape or form.

Saturday Night Live — George Santos Cold Open (12/2/23)