Robert Lloyd’s review of the new At the Movies, which debuted on TV this past weekend, hits on a good point that often gets lost in the, “Wow, The Two Bens were bad” pile-on. It’s not just that neither was very good, but that even in their badness, they were poorly matched:

Mankiewicz (grandson of “Citizen Kane” writer Herman and the great-nephew of “All About Eve” writer and director Joseph) was clearly better versed than Lyons (son of “Sneak Previews” host Jeffrey) in the literature of film, but that tended to make the show seem unbalanced. The original hosts could be spiky toward each other, but they always came off as equals; when they disagreed, Mankiewicz tended to make Lyons look wrong.

Lloyd is correct that the new version, starring A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips, “restores the balance” between critics that made the old Siskel and Ebert battles so entertaining. But the show is not as humorless as those shiny table promo shots might have you believe. Witness my favorite moment of the first episode above, in which Scott approaches his review of Guillermo Arriaga’s The Burning Plain as a dry, conceptual joke.

Above: the nearly five minute trailer for the new incarnation of At the Movies, starring A.O. Scott and Michael Phillips. Of note for the strenuous attempt to imprint the notion that this pair is all that those young, recently fired guys named Ben were not. Actual titles used on screen within the first minute of the trailer: “Two accomplished critics”; “Serious reviews”; “Serious journalists.” The trailer also allows Philips and Scott to casually run down their list of professional credentials, and then goes behind the scenes of a photo shoot producing a very serious promotional shot of the two critics sitting at a big shiny table. It’s all very, very serious. Which is awesome.

Regarding the news that Michael Phillips and A.O. Scott have been hired to replace The Two Bens as hosts/dueling critics of At the Movies, at first there didn’t seem to be much to say other than what everyone else was saying — basically, “Yay! A rare victory for intelligence/maturity/old-fashioned film criticism values!” I like Anne Thompson’s headline on her post on her new indieWIRE blog: Disney/ABC Replaces Lyons and Mankiewicz with Adult Critics Scott and Phillips. That about sums it up, no?

And yet, it’s undeniably of note that, here in on the margins of pop culture where we have conversations about things like film criticism, a return to something like the old way of doing things is met with such relief. This morning I read several blog posts and whatnot about the changes going on at the New York Times. The paper’s culture editor, Sam Sifton, is replacing Frank Bruni as their lead restaurant critic. At one point Sharon Waxman was reporting that Trish Hall, an editor of a few NYT food and lifestyle sections, had been tapped to take Sifton’s old job, but Sharon is now backtracking on that. Still, the swap of Sifton for Bruni is enough to open up a dialog about the idea that arts reporting and food criticism exist on enough of a parallel that the same person could qualify for both jobs, and thus the issues plaguing one kind of criticism would be spoken of in the same breath as the issues of the other.

Reading food blogger Josh Ozersky’s take on the NYT swap, I was struck by how easily his language could apply to our sphere, at least up to a point. A lengthy excerpt:

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Something big happened this week, and Ramin Bahrani’s Goodbye Solo — an unassuming, nonthreatening, ultimately uplifting indie drama with no stars and, one would think, no immediate hook for press coverage other than its merits ––  was at the center of it. Solo, which opens today in New York and L.A., motivated A. O. Scott and Richard Brody, two grown-up film critics for venerable New York publications (the New York Times and the New Yorker, respectively), neither of whom are known for engaging in public battle with the online rabble, to get into a blog fight.

It started when Scott published a long story (5 pages online) in the Sunday New York Times Magazine on an emergent genre he called Neo-Neo Realism, which he says unites festival favorites such as Ballast, Wendy and Lucy and Treeless Mountain with the works of Bahrani, as films concerning “fictional characters most often played by nonactors from similar backgrounds… [who are] familiar on a basic human level even if their particular predicaments are not. And if the kind of movie they inhabit is not entirely new — the common ancestor that established their species identity is a well-known Italian bicycle thief — their unassuming arrival on a few screens nonetheless seems vital, urgent and timely.” In other words: a number of filmmakers are making art films about the daily lives of poor people, and also the economy is bad. Coincidence? Scott thinks not.

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Here’s what I would like to learn from a movie about film critics: What makes them pertinent to the needs of society? Has the self-empowering progress of the blogosphere endangered the future of the profession? Most importantly, what kind of a fascinating loon do you have to be to watch movies all the time?

You will find answers to none of these provocative questions in Gerald Peary’s For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism, a light, impact-free survey of talking heads that adds absolutely nothing new to the general perception of the practice. Those viewers whose interest in watching critics talk about themselves parallels the curiosity behind, say, wanting to see an Asian elephant at the zoo won’t find themselves disappointed. (I can see it now: “Oh, so that’s what an A.O. Scott looks like…”) Everyone else may find the content lacking a much-needed edge.

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Never mind last night’s show being the gayest Oscars ever (I doubt it). And never mind it potentially being the most predictable (nuts to the Academy for not going with any of my badly foreseen surprises). Here’s my biggest criticism of the ceremony: the 81st Academy Awards had surely the worst directed telecast in history. Throughout the show I found myself commenting over and over, “show the clips, not the [stage; musicians; Queen Latifah; etc.].” There were great injustices done to the deceased, to Baz Luhrman’s choreography (even if it wasn’t a great musical number) and to the nominated actors and actresses, many of who could have used a spotlight on their performances rather than isolated praise from a random peer.

But apparently this year’s ceremony wasn’t designed for the TV viewers, possibly because the Academy didn’t expect anyone to tune in anyway (we showed them; ratings were actually up!). It was a big insular party for Hollywood — and a number of foreigners with excellent accents (and Styx tributes) — during which we were all better off reading the live-blogging and live-Twitterings found all over the interweb than watching the actual program. Often, awards live-blogging is pointless; too many bloggers merely list wins and incidents as they happen, which is redundant for people actually watching the show, while others comment without details, which is insufficient for people who missed the event. But overdone Snuggie references aside, this year’s type-it-as-they-see-it bloggers were better than usual. Chalk it up to boredom, but the commentary on the disasters and disappointments of the Oscars was witty, insightful and actually worth reading. Maybe not on all websites, but on a lot of them.

So, for my final Oscar column of the 2008 awards season, I’d like to circumvent celebrating the event (which doesn’t deserve much praise, in my opinion) and instead celebrate five of my favorite live-blogged/Twittered moments of the night. Though everyone loves to watch a train wreck in progress, sometimes it’s better to turn your head away and listen to someone else describe the tragedy for you. Here is a sampling of the best such observations of the worst such wrecks at this year’s ceremony:

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I have not been kind to Changeling, the Angelina Jolie-starring, Clint Eastwood-directed Oscar bait which opens wide today –– but admittedly, I also haven’t taken it very seriously. After seeing the supposed true-to-life drama at the New York Film Festival last month, I made the snap judgment that the film didn’t deserve my time –– it was such a silly, blatant exercise in statuette fishing, I thought, that the energy that I could expend detailing all its faults and falsehoods would be much better spent elsewhere. And certainly, plenty of other critics have covered some of the film’s key problematic factors. Dana Stevens‘ review pretty much sums it up, whether she’s citing Eastwood’s “clomping heavy-handedness” or his need to create a “deeply phony moral universe” in which to surround his victim-as-martyr manipulation shtick, which “keeps us at a stately remove, presenting Christine’s suffering as a kind of religious tableau.” But it was a throwaway line in A.O. Scott’s NYT review that made me realize that Changeling isn’t just a bad film –– it’s the final sign in a long line of them that Angelina Jolie, as we once knew her, has ceased to exist. That’s worth a minute or two.

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The first guest speaker on the first morning of the Moving Image Institute in Film Criticism and Feature Writing, New York Times critic A.O. Scott made a comment about the problematic nature of Iraq films that seemed to me to serve as a wider metaphor for the current crisis facing those of us struggling for security and longevity as film writers. To paraphrase, Scott suggested that dramatizations of the Iraq conflict have so far been generally disappointing because not only do we not yet know the outcome of the war, but it’s hard to hypothesize what either a positive or negative end would actually look like. This is essentially how I’ve come to feel about my chosen profession of late: unable to imagine what either a best or worst case scenario would actually look like, the idea of establishing long-term career goals seems unfathomable.

The Scott session, for me, reinforced the notion that there’s a divide between those of us who struggle to cobble together a living out of our engagement with the online film community, and those who, because of age or professional stature or other factors that I’m too young and naive to grasp, see the increasing empowerment of the audience as a nuisance.

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With an almost completely dead, holiday hungover RSS, I spent the morning leisurely slogging through this LA Times profile of 80s it-boy novelist Bret Easton Ellis. Much of the story’s 3,000 words are devoted to defenses of Ellis’ literary reputation, most notably for our purposes from New York Times film critic A.O. Scott, who praises Ellis as “a much more radical writer than he seems.” The rest of it details the oft-adapted novelist’s own attempts to break into screenwriting.

Ellis’ published work has so far formed the basis of three released films: the gloriously trashy Less Than Zero, in which Robert Downey Jr. essentially plays a future version of himself; Mary Harron’s American Psycho, which broke with Ellis’ trademark moral passivity in order to turn the material into obvious satire; and Roger Avery’s Rules of Attraction, which seemed to be kind of more about Roger Avery learning how to use Final Cut Pro than anything else. Somewhere along the way, Ellis apparently “realized he’s not very good at script doctoring” and started concentrating on crafting scripts from scratch. The first of these efforts to see the light of day will be the upcoming The Informers, for which Ellis adapted his own shot story collection in collaboration with Nicholas Jarecki. But to say that Ellis’ outlook on his new career is less than rosy would be an understatement. After the jump, an excerpt from the end of the article, in which Ellis semi-bitterly acknowledges that he’s in a “lost period.”

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Via Nikki Finke comes word of The Projectionist, a new blog at NYMag.com by the print edition’s resident film critic, David Edelstein. Edelstein’s only been blogging for a couple of days, and already he’s dropped a bit of self-promotion, with this post inviting fans to join him for a special screening of Sideways tonight at a wine bar in Brooklyn. Edelstein will be introducing the film, and will apparently use the opportunity to air a grievance that has been collecting dust for nearly 3 years:

I especially want to talk about the movie because a certain powerful critic (I won’t name him, but two of his initials are “A” and “O”) wrote a cheap, sleazy, opportunistic, and altogether scurrilous column to the effect that the film was acclaimed as intensely as it was because critics tend to be, like Sideways’ protagonist, pudgy, elitist, misanthropic alcoholics with no lives and not the faintest hope of snaring a dishy blonde like Virginia Madsen. To which I say, “Yes, but …”

I’m no detective, but I’m fairly sure Edelstein is referring to this column, in which a NY Times writer fitting the coy description above cited Alexander Payne’s Oscar almost-was as “the most overrated film of [2004].” I, unfortunately, won’t be able to make it down to Brooklyn tonight to see if said mystery writer shows up to defend his three-year stale hyperbole, but if you make it down there, I’ll expect a full report. In any case: welcome to the blogosphere, David!

After 18 years, is there anything new to say about The Simpsons that hasn’t already been said? Possibly, but if so, A.O. Scott isn’t saying it. At the Vulture blog, Dan Kois and/or Lane Brown (no byline on the post) notes that the film critic has basically spent his entire tenure at the New York Times dropping obsequious references to The Simpsons in places where they probably didn’t belong. To herald the arrival of Scott’s review of The Simpsons Movie, in which the critic leads off by announcing his contention that “the entire history of American popular culture — maybe even of Western civilization — amounts to little more than a long prelude to The Simpsons,” The Vultures round up eight examples of this, which stand in addition to Scott’s 2001 Simpsons hagiography, Homer’s Odyssey.

All of this begs the question: when a critic has shown an inordinate bias for or against a director/star/brand/topic/theme, should they then be recused from reviewing its associated products? Is it possible for even a professional critic to apply their usual acumen to a cultural product that they’ve already professed to being deeply in love (or hate) with? I don’t know. My long-burning crush on Clive Owen didn’t keep me from thinking Sin City was another soulless bit of hack-work from Robert Rodriguez. Whose films I uniformly can’t stand. So, uh, yeah, maybe.

Last week I walked five blocks to my favorite neighborhood cafe, managed to snag one of the “good” tables (near an outlet and a window, not too small), switched a couple of chairs around so I could sit on one that wasn’t wobbly, bought my Americano, and settled in to get lots of work done. But I couldn’t get on the Internet. No one around me could get on the Internet. And several people had asked cafe employees to restart the router several times. No one could figure out what the problem was. I ended up quickly drinking my coffee then packing up and walking home. A good hour, gone.

A few days later I went back to that cafe, and a barista told me what the problem had been: Some numskull was downloading a movie! Clueless or just selfish? Who knows. The point is that this whole movie downloading thing isn’t what you’d call a breeze. At least not yet.

But it’s still on everyone’s radars. The Sunday New York Times had three articles on the topic: “The Shape of Cinema, Transformed at the Click of a Mouse,” “The Revolution Will Be Downloaded (If You’re Patient,” and “Little Films on Little Screens.”

I wish the dude at the cafe had read the piece by Manohla Dargis (”The Revolution Will Be Downloaded”) before he screwed with the wireless network a couple dozen people were trying to access. Here’s a paragraph:

When all the planets are aligned and your computer has enough memory and hasn’t been deluged with spam for lots of little multicolored pills, it will function just dandy. But try to download without enough disk space and through a wireless connection, as I initially did, and you may soon wonder why you’re spending so much time and energy to watch films you’ve never heard of on your computer rather than watching a “Children of Men” DVD on your dreamy big television.

True enough.

And here are some bits from A. O. Scott’s article (”The Shape of Cinema”):

It is now possible to imagine–to expect–that before too long the entire surviving history of movies will be open for browsing and sampling at the click of a mouse for a few PayPal dollars….

…you have the potential of tens of thousands of movies competing for the burdened attention of the viewers…. How will they be sorted out? How will you know which ones you might want to see?

A.O. Scott, who says the question is asked out of plain-old curiosity, not out of fear that the professional critic is a waning vocation, ends up basically answering it later in the article:

It has become something of a truism that Web culture is driven not by traditional, top-down forms of tastemaking like the judgments of professional critics or the strategies of corporate marketers, but rather by the lateral operations of social networks.

…What will guide those choices? Will the social networks that drive taste on the Web discover new and neglected works? Will they manage to circumvent both relentless marketing and criticial myopia? If the short history of the Internet teaches anything, it’s that any decisive, early answer is sure to be wrong.

These are good questions for everyone at spout.com–employees and community members alike. The website was certainly created with those intentions–to help people sort through the “Long Tail,” to point to good movies that might be overlooked, and to listen to the opinions of real people, not marketing experts. But as with any community, the people who are in it ultimately determine the direction. We’re as eager as A.O. Scott to see what happens.