A site called Is It Woke or Not is making the rounds this week, and if the name doesn't tell you everything, the pitch will: it claims to score how progressive every movie and show is, one tidy grade at a time. Comic Basics has the rundown, and the comment sections under every write-up of it are already turning into a reenactment of the OK Corral.

I have complicated feelings, and I'll share them because that's the job.

On one hand, I understand the hunger. Audiences have been lied to so many times they've started building their own early-warning systems. A trailer promises an adventure movie and delivers a seminar with explosives attached; you paid $18 and two hours for the privilege of being corrected. When the people selling the tickets hold you in contempt, you eventually start asking your neighbors for reviews you can trust. This is a crowd-sourced allergy test, nothing more.

On the other hand, I've been grading movies against a standard since the Ford administration, and I can tell you the minute you reduce a film to a single score, you've lost the plot. Is 'The Sound of Music' woke? It's got a nun questioning authority and a man refusing to serve a tyrant. A website would slap a number on it and move on, and it would have told you nothing about whether the picture is any good, which it is, magnificently. The score can't hear the music. All it can do is count the checkboxes.

And that's my worry with all of these things. The studios turned storytelling into a compliance exercise, and now half the audience is responding with a compliance exercise of their own. I sympathize, truly. But two accounting departments arguing over a ledger doesn't make anybody an artist. What makes a movie worth your Saturday is craft, story, people you care about, and a director who assumes you're smart. No dropdown menu measures that.

What the site does measure, usefully, is the market. Hollywood executives scroll past these viral moments and pretend they don't see them, the same way they pretended not to see all those flops they called 'excellent films' right up until the write-downs. The audience built a scoreboard because the studios refused to keep an honest tally. Every time one of these sites goes viral, it's a receipt.

So use it if it saves you the price of a ticket. I'll keep doing it the old-fashioned way: watch the thing, then tell you exactly what I thought, in sentences, with reasons. The Rex Theater in Muskogee never gave anybody a numerical rating either, and somehow we all knew within a week whether a picture was worth the dime.