The Ryan Gosling-Emma Stone musical “La La Land,” for instance, is already a shoo-in for the best picture Oscar — the one that gets handed out five months from now . That means infinite waves of backlash until then, and backlash to the backlash, and so on and so forth until the average American moviegoer gets a look at the thing, at which point — meh. Maybe it’s not all that . The movie opens in Boston Dec. 9. There’s a good chance you may be sick of it by then.

I’m talking about hype, our culture’s addiction to it, a critic’s part in it, and the way it kills pleasure. We’re coming off the summer silly season and racing into the fall serious season, where great works of art and entertainment will fall like autumn leaves until they’re piled around our ankles. Or so we’re promised by early reports from film festivals in Venice, Toronto, and Telluride.

What’s the best way to destroy someone’s enjoyment in a movie? Easy! Tell them how much they’re going to enjoy it.

I’ve seen “La La Land.” I think it’s really good. I’ve also seen “Manchester by the Sea,” another movie that a lot of people are wild for and that opens here Thanksgiving week. I saw it back in January at Sundance and wrote about how this small, intense Boston-area drama from writer-director Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”), with its subtly powerful lead performance by Casey Affleck, just about brought me to tears. And I wasn’t the only one.


Last week, two friends of mine separately told me they saw the film at the Toronto International Film Festival and didn’t bust into sobs. One of them said, “I guess I’m just an awful person.” Well, no, you didn’t cry because you were told you were supposed to cry. This is the Heisenberg Principle of arts coverage. If you let hype build your expectations too high, you end up monitoring yourself instead of experiencing the show.


What’s a critic’s/arts journalist’s role in all this? Oh, we’re guilty as hell. At worst, we’re the handmaidens of a PR industry that wants to sell tickets; at best, our enthusiasms cheat you of an honest response. An early-warning festival report, like those I file from Sundance, can point you to gems way down the release schedule. It can also spoil them for you, especially when one festival report becomes two becomes 10 becomes buzz.

We live in a whirling media culture in which experience arrives pre-tested, pre-digested, judged, and signed off on. (There’s a reason many readers wait until after they’ve seen a movie to read the reviews.) Even if, like most people, you don’t pay attention to the festivals and only register new movies when they appear in your local theaters, the awards-season drumbeats infect the experience. I know so many casual filmgoers who went to “The Artist” after that 2011 film won the best picture Oscar; they went in expecting the bigness commensurate with an Important, Prize-Winning Film and were generally underwhelmed by the slender fable they found. Hype killed that movie for those people.

It’s not just movies, of course. Those old-fashioned folk who still get physical newspapers delivered to their doorstep have recently waded through thick Sunday supplements detailing the must-sees of Fall 2016 in TV, the stage, literature, and art. And this is fine; this is how the culture business goes round, by disseminating information and stoking our interest.


But a TV show like “Atlanta” or “Fleabag” — to name just two highly touted newcomers — requires an investment of time and curiosity, and it relies more baldly on user word-of-mouth; you can also bail after one or two episodes if a series isn’t to your liking. Stage plays are so expensive these days that producers fall back on pre-tested properties: The upcoming Broadway season includes musical reboots of movies like “Amelie,” “Anastasia,” and “The Bodyguard,” and restagings of “Miss Saigon,” “The Front Page,” “Sweeney Todd,” and “The Glass Menagerie.”

In the arena of pop music, though, something interesting has been happening: Stealth releases by major artists like Beyoncé, Frank Ocean, and Kendrick Lamar dropped into the public slipstream without warning and so end-running the hype machine while privileging first response. (The machine then goes into overdrive trying to catch up.) Can a movie be stealth-released? The recent “Blair Witch” tried, filming under a false name and only announcing its provenance at Comic-Con in July. It would have helped if it had been any good.

But pop recordings are more than ever a template for live performances where artists actually make their living and where audiences can find a sense of communion that no amount of hype can dispel. Two concerts I’ve been to in the past year — British soul singer Lianne La Havas at Boston’s Royale last September and grand old folkie John Prine at Worcester’s Hanover Theatre last weekend — will remain in my memory forever, thanks to the glow of their immediacy and the warm embrace by the singers of their audience and vice versa.


Do we even experience that communion at the movies anymore, the kind where audiences feel welded into one as they tumble together into a well-wrought story? Maybe when nostalgia’s involved, as with last year’s “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” Perhaps the dedicated fan-bases of the superhero franchises feel that way.

Who knows? Maybe “La La Land” will actually reignite a thirst for song and movement, the otherworldly thrill of the movie musical, among a modern mass audience.

If so, you didn’t hear it from me.

***

On Demand Tip o’ the Week: “Hunt for the Wilderpeople” (2016, PG-13), Taika Waititi’s rambunctiously engaging story of a foster kid (the hilarious Julian Dennison) and a crusty geezer (Sam Neill) on the lam in the New Zealand bush. It plays a little like Wes Anderson for kids; if you’re lucky, your children will let you watch it with them. Available for rent on Amazon and iTunes on Sept. 27.

Ty Burr can be reached at ty.burr@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @tyburr.