Appletell | Apple, Mac, iPhone, iPod | News, Rumors, Reviews, How-Tos

Category: Entertainment
Seller: Bite Interactive
Requirements: iPhone OS 3.0 or later
Compatibility: iPhone and iPod touch
File Size: 0.9MB
Version Reviewed: 1.2
Price: $2.99
Age Rating: 4+

Do the Oscars really get you excited? It’s tne night where we finally recognize the people that entertain us on the silver screen, and don’t they deserve it? Probably not, but if you’ve seen all of the movies up for nomination from the past year, you likely want to share your opinion with the world. As the old saying goes, there’s an app for that: The Red Carpet app.

This app’s main appeal is not really your ability to rate movies you’ve seen over the past year. Sure, that’s the main purpose, but probably not the reason anyone is buying this app.  It’s all about the $1,000,000 they have on the line at the Oscars.  That’s right, if you’ve seen enough movies over the past year, or maybe if you’re just lucky enough to guess all of the official Oscar winners in all categories correctly, you could win a cool million.  Actually, it’s a $1M annuity paid over 50 years, which is worth significantly less than $1M.  And just to bring it down a bit, should more than one person predict all winners successfully, the winnings are split between all correct entries. You can find all of the official rules at Bite Interactive.  I’m going to continue, because you won’t win.  Sorry, but that’s the truth in all games of chance.

Beyond the “prize,” The Red Carpet is all about movie ratings.  You can choose how you’d like to sort your ratings by “Categories,” “Movies to Rate” and “All Nominated Movies.”  Categories will group the nominees based on, you guessed it, categories, like Actor in a Leading Role, Art Direction etc.  You can also choose to rate all movies at once, or just the ones you haven’t already rated.  Rating movies/nominees is simple, though it requires too many taps. First the sorting method, then the movie, then the rating button, then the rating field, then the actual rating. That’s at least 5 taps to rate your first movie. I call that bad app design. Anyway, you can do a number of things with this rating. You can simply let the app keep it for your later reference, you can share it on Twitter or Facebook and you can submit it to the contest to win some money.

The App also integrates with NetFlix in case you haven’t seen all of the movies that have been nominated for the Oscars this year.  This seems like a strange integration to me, but Bite Interactive must have had the code laying around somewhere.  I mean, why would you buy an app who’s sole purpose is to rate movies nominated for Oscars if you haven’t seen the large majority of them?  Oh right, you still think you’re going to win a million dollars and quit your job. Still, if you add your NetFlix account details, you can add movies to your queue.  Alternatively, you can attempt to find theatres showing the movies that have been nominated for the Oscars this year.  This is also a pointless addition to the app since nearly all of these movies from the last year are already out of theatres, if not already on DVD/Blu-Ray.  If you haven’t been frustrated by this whole process thus far, you can rotate your iDevice 90 degrees to get a YouTube preview of the movie in question.  This is a neat feature that’s executed well.  That’s one.

Overall, I’m disappointed by this app.  I don’t feel the need to share my movie ratings with anyone using Twitter or Facebook.  Perhaps you disagree with me, but ultimately, this app is not worth $3.  Maybe it’s worth $1, but really the price is just trying to pay for that annuity that no one is going to win.