Club Clash

Has Michael Medved been snubbed by his colleagues? He certainly thinks so.

"The New York Film Critics Circle is like 40 criticsit's insane, they had people from weekend throwaways [free newspapers]. I was the chief critic of the Post for five years; the [Post's] third-string critic [Thelma Adams] was a member of the circle, but I was never allowed to join. Why was I never made a member of the L.A. Film Critics [Association] all those years on Sneak Previews? Of course! It's politics." (Or perhaps the problem was that Sneak Previews was filmed in Chicagoit wasn't local.)

"I was the second-string critic!" protests Adams, now at Us. "That's kind of rude!" She says Medved's conservatism was a factor in his New York rebuff, but mainly it was because he lived in L.A. "John Simon [a critic so conservative he's actually Transylvanian] was a member. He's right that it is politicalas in being a high-school president." She acidly notes that Medved's insulting reference to her status indicates a lack of high-school-politics savvy. "It's a club, and in clubs, you have to play that a lot shrewder. And he wasn't local to play the politics."

Medved has had better luck in Seattle. "To the eternal credit of the Seattle film critics circle," he says, "it's the first local film critics body that I've ever been invited to join." Actually, it's not a circle per se, but an ad hoc group of 23 local critics invited to vote on annual awards. —T.A.