Amy Nicholson, the Los Angeles Times’s film critic, wants to go into a movie clean. That means no reading festival coverage, no perusing movie gossip websites for the skinny on director-star brouhahas. And especially no trailers. Watch one and the would-be electrifying experience dulls for Nicholson as she awaits the inevitable. 

No amount of popcorn (olive oil and salt, please) or the perfect seat (up front) can ease the pain. So, if Nicholson is in the theater with her boyfriend and a trailer starts, she’ll put his baseball hat over her face. To fend off the theater’s surround sound, she may hum to herself.  

Has anyone ever expressed their dismay? “Maybe,” says Nicholson, a 2002 University of Oklahoma graduate and former National Merit Scholar, “but I haven’t heard or seen them.”

If you’re a pop culture buff, it’s impossible not to notice Nicholson. 

Smart and an ebullient prose stylist, Nicholson landed at the LA Times in November 2024 after a seemingly endless audition, replacing friend and Pulitzer Prize winner Justin Chang. The job is one of few full-time film critic positions left. She’s on air, delivering reviews at KCRW Radio and the nonprofit newsroom LAist. She’s in your ear buds, co-hosting the “Is-it-or-isn’t-it-a-classic?” movie podcast “Unspooled” with comedian Paul Scheer. She’s writing a non-fiction book, Extra Girls, for Simon & Schuster. In February, she served on the jury for the Berlin International Film Festival.

Los Angeles is her home and continuous source of creative nourishment, but OU is where Nicholson’s passion for film blossomed. 

Growing up in San Antonio, Nicholson watched movies—a childhood fave was the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles—but she wasn’t an obsessive. Her family loved books. However, one OU class was a revelation. In her freshman year, Nicholson took “Films in Context of the Great Depression,” taught by OU’s legendary Film and Media Studies Professor Emeritus Joanna Rapf. 

“I hadn’t realized movies were important in that way,” she says, “that they were a timeline of history.”

At OU, Nicholson wrote her own script. “When I was in the film department, we were taking classes on everything from drive-in movies to horror movies to German expressionism. We didn’t get shoehorned into learning the same old canon that a lot of my friends who went to other film schools came out with.” 

Scenes from that time endure: Beholding the black-and-white spectacle of Bubsy Berkeley’s Footlight Parade and realizing that a movie didn’t have to fit snugly into a genre. (It could be “jaw-dropping, subversive and patriotic,” she says.) Working at Bizzell Memorial Library in the pre-streaming era and using its interlibrary loan service to hunt down film gems not available at Blockbuster Video or that critics Pauline Kael or Roger Ebert had lauded. 

One gem was 1981’s Pennies from Heaven, a musical set in the Great Depression starring Steve Martin, now her favorite movie of all time. Nicholson began to watch. Stunned, she stopped the tape and called the boyfriend she had just broken up with. 

“Let’s get back together. You have to come over and watch this movie.” 

Nicholson was part of an OU student community that loved the arts and thought the film Pollock coming to town was the weekend’s big event. A few “Oklahomies” joined her in Los Angeles, where she started as an intern for LA Weekly after graduation. 

The idea to become a film critic came during Nicholson’s senior year at OU. The logic: She could be in “constant conversation with the culture” and the job would never get old. But idea and reality clashed. Nicholson was struggling to feed herself when she arrived in LA. Sleeping on someone’s floor and noodle dinners were common. She tutored SAT students. Meanwhile, the print journalism industry was eroding. But she kept writing. Always. 

“I just couldn’t imagine myself doing anything else,” says Nicholson, previously the chief film critic at LA Weekly and MTV News. “I felt like it was the one job that perfectly suited my brain and could keep me excited to go to work every single day. And every other option just seemed worse.”

And now, she is reviewing movies in the city she loves for a paper she reveres. Like all dream jobs, though, it’s a job. 

Movies keep getting made. Stars are born every day. Deadlines exist. The goal remains to have a conversation with the reader, to get them engaged in what they see Friday night. The big difference is the scope. 

Nicholson pores through the LA Times for research into old Hollywood. She is now part of all that, which blows her mind. But she has always written reviews to last beyond opening weekend. Movies, and those trailers, come and go. Amy Nicholson isn’t going anywhere.

“I love the idea of writing for history,” she says. “If people want to know how wild it was being alive in 2025, hopefully some of that is there in my reviews.” 

Pete Croatto is a freelance writer living in central New York.

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