So, this year The New York Times‘ Carpetbagger Oscar season blog will be written not by David Carr, who created the brand and helmed it for four Oscar seasons, but by Melena Ryzik, a reporter, video blogger and sometime poet previously on the paper’s general culture beat. The Variety story on the matter suggests that Carr stepped down from the post in order to fully focus his attention on “the quickly changing world of publishing,” and also because last year’s Slumdog-centric race bored the shit out of him and he couldn’t fathom pretending to care about a non-competition again contributed to “simple burnout.” Which happens. Even if you’re only doing it part time, four years is a long time to stay chained to a blog.

It is hard to imagine The Carpetbagger sans Carr’s red-carpet-outsider Bagger persona, but I wish Ryzik (seen above, posing with Karl Lagerfeld) luck and I’m excited to see what she brings to the beat. And not, unlike some of my chromosomal compatriots, just because of “girl power.” Because, really — the game of Oscar yelling is already overcrowded. Her being a broad (and, as Carr put it on his Twitter, a “fresh young” one at that) isn’t going to matter much if she doesn’t have something interesting to say, and maybe even more importantly, a way of saying it that cuts through the noise and demands attention.

In other words, I’m not concerned with gender quotas in Oscar blogging. I’m concerned that Oscar blogging has lost its urgency –– as has much of year-round film blogging, as so many of us either waste time bickering amongst ourselves, or piling on the same semi-stories in a desperate quest to chase the traffic that keeps us alive. I don’t know what the solution is, but I hope for Ryzik’s sake, she finds a way to shake up the cycle.

I’m not sure what it means that one weekend, I sit on a film festival panel about criticism and barely get a word in edgewise, and the next weekend become the center of a scandal on another film festival panel while actually physically attending yet another film festival on the opposite side of the globe. I guess I am more interesting in absentia. More remarkable is that, thanks to the magic of Twitter, I was able to comment on an argument about myself from 7,000 miles away, in virtual real time.

To recap for the Twitilliterate: there was a panel on film criticism at the Hamptons International Film Festival this weekend. I was not there; I was, and still am, in Abu Dhabi at the Middle East International Film Festival (see my coverage here). According to Michael Tully, on that panel Karen Durbin (film critic for Elle, with whom I shared space on another panel the week before at Woodstock) mentioned my writing on this blog as an example of high quality “in-depth criticism” happening on the web. When the conversation shifted to the “internet’s democratization of authoritative/professional voices,” Durbin again brought up my name as an example of something worthwhile online. Then things got weird.

According to Tully’s report at /Hammer to Nail, NY Press critic Armond White then “dismissively reminded Durbin that he was proud to be a member of a professional organization. When she asked him if he’d read Longworth’s writing at Spout, he replied that he had and stressed that she/they were not a member of their own organization [the New York Film Critics Circle] for a reason, adding, ‘The reason is they don’t rate.’” After that, there was apparently some heated cross talk, and “it felt like all hell was about to break loose, but instead of turning into a full-blown war, everyone regrouped and took the discussion in another direction.”

It’s hard for me to know how to respond to the criticisms leveled against me without having been there to hear them for myself, but I can try to speak to the concept of professionalism in general as I think it applies to me. This entire panel has been reduced to “Armond White Disses Karina Longworth,” but I find it hard to believe that this is all really about Armond White thinking that I am a bad writer. If there are several ways to interpret this incident, I chose to believe, as Tully put it, that White “didn’t actually know who Durbin was referring to but he knew that she was talking about internet writing and that was enough to warrant a curt dismissal (hence, his use of the word ‘they’ instead of ‘she’).” I think this is about death.

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I’m glad it’s such a slow news day. Now I can concentrate on something that blew up on a few of the blogs last night: discussion/debate of the new FTC disclosure rule for bloggers, particularly as it relates to James Rocchi and others’ recent trip to Bora Bora on Universal’s dime.

Rocchi’s MSN piece about his Couples Retreat junket experience is a good read, but it doesn’t really convince me that a lenghty excursion to French Polynesia was worth his, the studio’s or our time in any way. But I’ve always felt weird about junkets. The few I’ve been to made me extremely uncomfortable, especially when there’s food and drink offered (I always decline since I suspect one day the world’s publicists will decide to poison the world’s film critics in a further attempt to rid the industry of negative reviews).

I don’t really have much to add to the discussion since I no longer review films or interview celebs and I always prefer to see movies with a real audience instead of with spoiled critics attending their third or fourth free press screening of the day. And unlike a lot of movie bloggers, I can’t use the t-shirt swag since I’m too thin for XL, which is typically the sole size available with complimentary clothing.

Honestly, I’m okay with the FTC regulations, as they benefit consumers, particularly those too dumb to tell when a site is professional and ethical and when it’s a lame freebie free-for-all like Blogcritics (which I admit I unfortunately used to contribute to before getting paid to blog). However, I’d much prefer an agency that would come around and regulate websites that “hire” and “employ” unpaid writers. Maybe if any of us could get a wage — not to mention a respectable wage — we wouldn’t keep pretending this is all a fun hobby, a la autograph collecting and fan fiction.

And on that note, I have one more point related to one of the blog posts quoted in this roundup. I’ll go on the record with others and defend Cinematical for being one of the few sites remaining that regularly pay all writers in a timely fashion — and for those not living in expensive NYC, they pay decently, especially for a time when adshare models are so popular. It’s true that I left that site a year ago in protest over a temporary financial practice by AOL, but in the past year I’ve had so many requests to contribute unpaid to numerous movie blogs out there, and I’d take Cinematical any day over any of that nonsense.

I’ll quit writing now before I get in or make trouble, but as always these matters can be best contemplated with the old idiom, “you get what you pay for.”

Check out what some bloggers have to say on the topic after the jump. And be sure to read the full posts I’ve quoted from, as well as the comments — many from other bloggers. It’s an interesting discussion going on.

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I was on vacation/self-imposed internet exile when David Hudson’s IFC blog, The Daily, ceased publishing at the end of last month, so I didn’t realise it had happened until nearly two weeks later. By that point, indieWIRE had stepped in to fill the void with cinemadaily, a five-day-a-week column that usually focuses on one blogospheric meme per day. It was something, but it wasn’t enough: I missed the quick-glance view of the entire day’s worth of news and chatter that Hudson used to offer, and I especially missed his summaries of the Arts sections of international weekend papers.

Today, Hudson is back with a new vehicle for his mad collation/curation skills. The Auteurs Daily will live on the cineaste site’s blog, the Notebook, with a twist: items that would have gone in the section that Hudson used to call Shorts will now be broadcast directly to Twitter. “I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been a dedicated Twitter disparager in the past,” Hudson writes, but he now belives the microblogging platform will be the perfect way to streamline his service whilst broadcasting it in a hyper-timely fashion. You can follow those tweets here. Welcome back, David!

Variety published three separate but similar “Top Stories” Sunday (one - two - three) on the topic of blogs and how certain bloggers (mainly Nikki Finke, pictured) exhibit questionable journalistic practices. What seemed at first to be an excessive, behind-the-times and otherwise forgettable trio of articles has today (and initially last night) become a topic of discussion for many film bloggers, including some who were mentioned in these Variety pieces who felt the need to respond.

My personal response is primarily, as I said, one of disregard. But here’s a quick commentary: I enjoy Finke and others as I might have appreciated Louella Parsons or Hedda Hopper decades ago — with a grain of salt. The fact that some bloggers are taken more seriously for their rumors and faulty reporting styles than, say, any one of the hundred other fanboy movie blog sites out there is the problem of the reader (especially the one who’s a Hollywood player), not the writer.

Though the timeliness of Variety’s blogger-hating trilogy comes on the heel of recent errors and conflicts involving Finke and others, there’s no more necessity in such articles as there would be for a trio of stories about the trustworthiness of Fox News. Don’t read the blog, don’t watch the channel, don’t read the trade magazine if you don’t like their content.

Anyway, I’ve given my two cents; read what others have to say after the jump:

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Only a handful of people were in attendance for last night’s world premiere of blogger/filmmaker Sujewa Ekanayake’s new documentary Indie Film Blogger Road Trip at NYC’s Anthology Film Archives. Apparently most fans and writers of blogs had better things to do, such as read and write posts on the internet. Because really, what is the point of watching a film about writers about films? The only thing more unnecessary and inwardly spiraling — obviously I’m guilty of it here — is blogging about a film about bloggers about film.

Even with the film blogosphere’s reputation for insularity Ekanayake’s doc has no purpose, because its subject matter and content are already well documented on blogs. And anything new that might be discussed, any new questions that might be raised would also be more appropriately written about on the web. The film’s largest offense, though, is that it doesn’t even seem to have an intended purpose. It does not actually attempt to offer anything new to the discourse on film blogging. Nor does it have any sort of cohesive thesis regarding any preexisting discourse. The doc is simply a series of long, mostly uncut interviews with film bloggers. It’s not even necessarily a sufficient profile of the film blog community, in a “Meet the Bloggers” kind of way.

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Every time Kurt Kuenne’s Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father, my review of the film gets a new flood of angry comments. Since my analytical response to the documentary seems to be so thoroughly out of tune with the emotional responses of MSNBC viewers, I thought I’d excerpt from a few of these comments in order present the argument of the other side:

“Katrina ,
Your pure uttering of nonsense assures me that you yourself suffer of some form of illness. And I am not saying this as an insult. I truly believe you must be scarred or simply looking to rile up attention by being simple.” — michelle

“Can’t you see that Karina wrote an amateur minded article with the purpose of stirring up emotions? … Move on to a quality review, secure in your own ideas and inspirations.” — John

“I’m stunned at reading the the above “review”, - or that this film was even ‘reviewed’ at all by anyone…The basis for this film are horrid, the final outcome is unthinkable, and for YOU to criticize “how” it was made is beyond me. Just how many devoted friends to you have Karina?” — Judy

“I’m writing to Karina and I just want to say that people like you are what makes up the crazy in this world. I will say a prayer for you.” — tammy

Lessons learned: Documentaries shouldn’t be reviewed; film reviews shouldn’t ask you to question “your own ideas and inspirations”; my name is Katrina, and I am sick and mad because I tried to do my job, which I’ve always thought is not to assess a film’s merits based on how it made me feel, but on the choices made by the filmmaker, his/her degree of craft, and the quality of the finished product divorced of the maker’s noble intentions. I guess I was wrong!

Historic news! David Hudson, the master of film blogging behind GreenCine Daily, is leaving that site to start a new blog for IFC. That blog, called The Daily, will launch January 1. Meanwhile, GreenCine Daily will be taken over by Aaron Hillis, freelance writer and co-founder of Benten Films.

Why is this a big deal? In the brief history of the film blogosphere, nobody has ever even tried to aggregate film news and commentary as thoroughly and elegantly as David Hudson. And maybe it’s holiday season fuzzy headed-ness on my part, but the idea that there will soon be two places for me to go for curated bloggy aggregation kind of blows my mind.

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• The subject of today’s Friday Screen Test interview at DVD Panache is film blog hero David Hudson of GreenCine Daily. An excerpt, regarding something he learned from watching movies: “I’m going to have to be a little cryptic…I walked into the film in a state of torment, not even realizing that what was tearing me up was the need to make a decision. When I walked out, I realized that I was facing a choice that hadn’t been clear to me before. And I knew damn well which way I’d have to decide. And, sorry, but I’ll have to leave it at that. I will say, though, that, as is often the case is such situations, the movie wasn’t even a particularly good one!”
• This Vanity Fair chart weirdly lumps Cannes in with a number of summer music events, including Coachella and the “Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.” You’ll have to judge its accuracy for yourself, but I made it through ten days in the South of France without going near a yacht, a bellini nor cocaine. I swear.
• Congratulations are in order for Friends of Spout David Lowery and Dia Sokol, whose feature projects (respectively: St. Nick and Sorry, Thanks; the latter stars another FoS, Wiley Wiggins) have been selected for IFP’s Independent Filmmakers Lab, which means they’ll also make the short list for a new $50,000 grant.

If I link to a blog set up a week ago by a woman who claims she’s going to kill herself after 90 days of posting, and in focusing on a post about movies, I gloss over the ethical issues––is she really going to kill herself, or will the whole thing will end with a romantic “choose life” reversal worthy of a romantic comedy because all along she was just trying to get a book and/or movie deal, or is it just a conceptual piece to prove the point that once you’re dead to the internet, you might as well be dead in life?––am I then a horrible person, or am I just doing my job as a movie blogger? Or both?

I shouldn’t have even touched this, I’m sure. But here goes…
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• Erin at Steady Diet of Film has some notes on the Sundance lineup, including: “Why is rape as a weapon in war the new issue du jour? Hmm…”
• Filmbrain reports that “the finishing touches are being applied to Benten Films’ second release, Quiet City & Dance Party, USA: Two Films by Aaron Katz.” The cover looks gorgeous.
• Tom Hall recommends Mr. Warmth, John Landis’ documentary on Don Rickles, which premieres this Sunday night on HBO: “When I read that the documentary was included in this fall’s New York Film Festival line-up, I was skeptical of its place in the program. Having seen the film (and experienced the amazing press conference with Mr. Landis after the screening), I can say that its portrait of a lost era of American “show business” is both moving and deeply felt. And, obviously, laugh out loud funny.”
• Burbanked profiles Chris Thilk, friend of SpoutBlog and proprietor of Movie Marketing Madness, for the series Tales of Blogging Passion.
• “Just over 20 years ago, I thought of killing myself. Or rather, the thought was suddenly present in me, like an unwanted ghost.” So begins an amazing–and amazingly personal–post at Michael Atkinson’s Zero For Conduct, in which he talks of his own battles with said ghost in relation to the suicides of several slightly bolder-faced names, particularly Spalding Grey.

The tech blogs are abuzz (or, were, while you were eating turkey and I was out of town) about this post on TechCrunch, in which Dan Ackerman Greenberg, a Stanford business student who makes a living “run[ning] clandestine marketing campaigns meant to ensure that promotional videos become truly viral” shares “some of the techniques I use to do my job: to get at least 100,000 people to watch my clients’ ‘viral’ videos.”

TechCrunch later published a letter from Greenberg, in which he claimed his “original post was framed quite differently, but after going through the TechCrunch editorial filter, it ended up sounding like a tell-all about our shady business practices.” Greenberg went on to say that he had intended to write a “how-to for marketers on YouTube, morals aside, in an attempt to bring to light everything that could be (and is) going on on YouTube and beyond. However, I DO NOT EMPLOY OR ENDORSE ALL OF THE STRATEGIES USED IN THE POST.”

Bloggers and the TechCrunch commenters got all up in arms about the very idea that corporations are essentially paying a firm to game YouTube, but I’m wondering if this really news? More after the jump.

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Posting may be a bit light today and Friday, as I’m heading to Denver to attend the final weekend of the Starz Denver Film Festival. Kevin and Paul will be posting a bit while I’m gone, so be nice to them. Hopefully I’ll find the time to scribble something about the films screening while I’m there, including Starting Out in the Evening, the much-lauded doc  A Walk Into the Sea, and the comedy Karl Rove, I Love You. And if you’re in Denver, come see me speak on this panel on Friday. It’s very important that I put as many sympathetic plants in the audience as possible.

Piper at Lazy Eye Theater has started meme challenging bloggers to build a post around the infamous Dramatic Chipmunk clip, with the goal being to utilize the familiar viral video “in new and different ways but not in ways that might attract creepy middle-aged guys.” Alan at Burbanked answered this challenge by inserting the Chipmunk into a lesson on Lev Kuleshov’s Montage Effect. Kuleshov, a contemporary of Eisenstein, argued that shot order matters because each image in a film is imbued with meaning by the image that comes before it. So suddenly, the chipmunk’s drama makes sense–-”It’s as if that piping hot soup is just outside his reach.” More here.