I know this is rhetoric as part of an evaluation.
Still, objectivity we strive for, though if it were fully achievable and we overstrived for it, we’d all come to the same judgment. So your taste definitely has to modify it. Then the flipside is if it’s all taste and you don’t bring your evaluative experience, you’re no judge.
I’m a bit more wary of objectivity in the latter half of my life. If I look at something like IMDB, where I’ve got thousands of film ratings, I ask myself why have I rated so many films that have been importantly wound up in the fabric of my life for decades lower than some films which I thought were really high quality but which I never saw again or was even motivated to see again? Well, I know why. Objectivity and my history of reviewing.
There’s some kind of failure of the evaluative process here in terms of what a stranger would think if they looked at the data, whether they knew me or not. But the data’s all they’ve got, so that’s all they will see. It turns out the data neither reflects my own life, nor what I really feel, but it’s all that’s speaking to the corpus. It reflects some attempt at objectively assessing good filmmaking. Horror movies, with all their rough edges, consistently struggle on that scale, but they’re actually the ones most important to me. Are they all Really worse? Of course not! It’s just the only tool we’re able to measure by is somehow not suited to the task. Yet for want of better, and having been in a lot of critical action for decades, it still mostly oversees what my hands do.
-Wade