Oscar winners and some of the biggest movies of the past 20 years are taken apart by brilliant film critic Peter Rainer in this Media Mayhem interview. Why Zero Dark Thirty failed, the problems with American Beauty, and the “arrested adolescence” of Quentin Tarantino are highlighted in this interview that also touches on homosexuality in movies and the lack of political intelligence in American cinema. Rainer lets us in on the intellectual obligation of a critic and Hollywood’s aversion to intelligence through many examples that show the pitfalls of show business.

Peter Rainer is chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and the editor of the anthology Love and Hisses (Mercury House). He was a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize in Criticism. He wrote and co-produced the A&E Biographies of Sidney Poitier and The Hustons.

His newest book is the collection, “Rainer on Film: Thirty Years of Film Writing in a Turbulent and Transformative Era.”