Shambu was one of several on a Film Comment panel/podcast, explicitly produced in anticipation of the S&S poll, about the purpose of list-making, gaming or not gaming your S&S list, canons, representation, with a sidebar on the place of documentary in the broader canon, etc, etc., and talked about this a little bit, and yes, I had the impression that was basically it: suggest critics to invite to participate.furbicide wrote: ↑Mon Dec 05, 2022 2:54 amSecondly, I don't know exactly what the role of Girish Shambu – the author of the Tweet in question, and a respected film critic in his own right – was in voter selection, but my anecdotal impression is that he was most likely just one of a number of international critics asked to submit lists of new potential invitees from various geographical regions. If he and others took that directive as a mission to reach out to people from less represented backgrounds, then ... isn't that part of the point, and entirely legitimate?
The notion that this constituted some kind of a "kamikaze mission", as Kremer puts it, is ridiculous. It's not as if Shambu was able to choose what his recommended invitees submitted. Expanding the franchise to a more diverse group of people was both the explicit (and entirely justifiable) aim of this year's expansion, and one consultant's personal feelings about wishing to upend the canon in no way suggests that anyone was putting a thumb on the scale.
It sounds like this was already the case in 2012 as well, they just expanded it even more; while the 2002 list was based on 145 responses, the 2012 list was based on 846 responses from ~1,000 asked—"though I can’t pretend that the 1,000 or so individuals were selected by any more rigorous process than simple chains of recommendation"—and they "were also keen to include among them critics who’d established their careers online rather than purely in print." Online criticism has obviously only overtaken print further in the past decade, so in that regard, it's... a more accurate reflection of contemporary film criticism. And, at least so far as it looks from my little corner of Film Twitter, the folks they added this round are still critics who are published in reputable places. Screen Slate and Little White Lies and RogerEbert.com may not be Cahiers or The Times, but they're undeniably influential voices in contemporary film criticism. Given that they nearly dectupled list requests last decade and expanded the final count from 10 to 100, they seem to have intentionally been laying the ground work for this even greater expansion and the shuffling it would lead to.