The Screengrab

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.

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Chicago film critic Jim Emerson has published the first part of his 2007 Exploding Head Awards on his blog, Scanners (not to be confused with Hooksexup's blog, Scanner). It's far more entertaining than most year-end lists, but we did notice a great deal of repetition. Let's run down exactly what makes Jim's head explode, shall we?

No Country For Old Men made Jim's head explode no less than 13 times. If you were sitting next to him for that one, your shirt definitely needed to be dry-cleaned.

Judd Apatow and friends caused 10 cranial eruptions: 7 for Superbad, 3 for Knocked Up.

Juno appears 3 times, meaning it caused Jim severe hemorrhaging, but he recovered.

Persepolis, There Will Be Blood, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Zodiac, Atonement, Margot at the Wedding, Ratatouille and Southland Tales each show up twice. They all gave Jim nasty nosebleeds. Check out the full list, if only to see the winners in such fabulous categories as "Best performance by an inanimate object", "Most cringe-worthy lines" and " Best Supporting Crotch." 

FILM GEEK EXTRA: Can you identify the exploding head pictured? (Hint: Not Jim Emerson's.) — Gwynne Watkins