Manohla Dargis and A.O. Scott of the NYT, in a joint bylined article from Cannes, give a shout-out to those disappearing film critics. Speaking of the fest, they say that “the excitement is tempered by a sense that those films are facing unusually difficult prospects back in the United States.”

Tempered excitement on the Riviera! Those poor people. Anyway, here’s one of the things doing the tempering:

The number of film critics writing for traditional print outlets has thinned dramatically in the last year as media companies face shrinking revenues and uncertain futures. Whereas big-budget commercial releases can almost always buy a solid opening weekend at the box office with wall-to-wall publicity and advertising, smaller films depend greatly on the support of critics to find their audiences. That’s especially true these days, with so many films opening theatrically — more than 600 titles in 2007—and competing for a seemingly shrinking audience.

The disappearing film critic is one of those memes that’s been floating around for the past year or so. But all the commotion about it doesn’t make sense. There are a number of things going on.

1) Critics have been disappearing for a long time. Dailies across the country have been cutting back on both film-writer positions and film coverage newsprint space for a decade. The New Times chain, now totaling nearly 20 alternative papers, has moved almost entirely to national critics. (I helped set up the beginnings of that system more than 10 years ago.) Yet art films have been doing quite well in that period; look at the Academy Award nominations for the last three years.

2) This doesn’t take into account the tsunamis of writing about film on the web. Some of it is silly, but a lot of it is substantive, but by any measure there are oceans more intelligent writing about film available to normal people than there was ten years ago.

3) With the rise of companies like Amazon and Netflix, more indie and art films are available to more people than ever before as well. (And let’s not forget the effects of the intermittently useful reader reviews on Amazon and elsewhere.) But of course, that (and No. 2) brings up the difficult issue of …

4) … consumer choice. Life is great for movie fans… you can get the movies you want when you want them, and there’s a lot of places to get advice on what to watch. What Dargis and Scott are talking about is one teeny-tiny slice of the pie right now: The slice, from the studios point of view, that used to feature folks in de facto monopolistic positions (i.e., daily newspaper film critics) speaking to voluntary recipients of hegemonic information delivery systems (i.e., daily newspaper subscribers) via actual recommendations published on pressed paper pulp (i.e., free publicity on newsprint).

Yes, those days are indeed gone, but who cares? Indeed, as the pair say in that same paragraph, there are oceans more traditionally released films in the U.S. as well. Kind of a puzzle, isn’t it? You gotta figure the distributors are trying to make a buck; it’s counterintuitive that they would they release more movies if, as Dargis and Scott imply, the audience is shrinking. (I’m sorry— “seemingly” shrinking.)

This really comes down to a minor marketing problem for the folks in the art film publicity game. Tell them to call Starbucks; over time they will learn how to market their films effectively to an empowered audience. The rest of us are doing fine.

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Previously in Hitsville:

The year of the disappearing film critics
More on the disappearing film critics