We've seen a lot of despairing think-pieces and blog posts this year written by, for and about film critics this year — specifically, how we're all dead on the ground. Mass firings, reductions in word count for space reasons, mass syndications of writers to every newspaper in the land that eradicate distinctive individual voices — none of this is news, and even if you're part of the target audience it can be tiresome. Just in time for Thanksgiving, Roger Ebert took it one step further: the death of literate film criticism (specifically, to make room for celebrity gossip and "reporting") isn't just distressing to those predisposed to care about disinterested analysis and cinematic championing. "It is not about the disappearance of film critics," he declares. "It is about the death of an intelligent and curious, readership, interested in significant things and able to think critically. It is about the failure of our educational system. It is not about dumbing-down. It is about snuffing out."

I'm not sure what to think of Ebert's fascinating dispatch. There's a lot in it: he's suitably pissed, for example, about the AP's declaration to all writers that film reviews must now never pass 500 words. But does the death of literate film criticism presage a larger cultural decline? Whenever you start thinking in apocalyptic, death-of-the-intellectual terms, you end up in the territory academics have made their specialty in occasional book-length diatribes, from Allan Bloom's infamously myopic and cranky The Closing Of The American Mind to the recent The Dumbest Generation. This is rarely productive territory for anyone. A smaller, better question would be not if intellectual society is dying (it's always been in the minority, something people tend to forget in the annual cri de couers), but whether the idea of getting paid to think is dying out in every non-academic context.

I'll go with yes, sort of. There's a long-standing, eternal debate of whether critics should reflect mass tastes or try to set their own, often more inaccessible critical agenda that Ebert touches on, but that's beside the point. It is, in fact, possible to think critically about mass cultural phenomena. "Why does the biggest story about "Twilight" involve its fans?" Ebert asks. "Isn't the movie obviously about sexual abstinence and the teen fascination with doomy Goth death-flirtation?" The answer is that with a movie like Twilight, as Todd Gitlin once observed about blockbusters, "the sum of the publicity takes up more cultural space than the movie itself." The only real response to a movie like Twilight is to refuse to take the movie as purported aesthetic object seriously and try to figure out why people are going crazy over it. Another Robert Pattinson piece isn't needed, but perhaps, for example, someone might like to look into the not-entirely-deranged conservative meme that Twilight is some kind of Agnew-esque homily for "traditional values." This kind of shallow but engaging acknowledgment of the overpowering — and sometimes alarmingly meaningful — place crap art can have in inadvertantly shaping mass society will be profitable, and there's a chance someone can do it well.

Is a film criticism as a paying, stable occupation dying out? Maybe. (I hope not, since it's what I do, but I've been cautioned recently not to get overly optimistic.) But, sometime soon, the role of cultural critic will have to extend beyond the purview of the New York Times Magazine. Is thinking thoughtfully about celebrity culture a bit of an oxymoron? Probably. But it's the best we'll have for a while until Web 2.0 figures out how to make intelligent criticism pay again. In the meantime, dig up your old copies of Tom Wolfe's 60s Cary Grant profile and hope someone follows his example.