newcritics

Personally, I think it was just a weird year.
As I thought about sketching my ideas of potential nominees for Oscar (my own peculiar way of trendspotting each year), I realized that most of the movies either… didn’t move me, or didn’t interest me. There were dramatic exceptions to this (Milk, Frost/Nixon, Rachel Getting Married top [...]

I live for this.
No seriously - these are the months I love… the months from Oscar nominations to actual ceremonies (although, if you ask me, it’s criminal that ABC pushed the Academy to put the Oscars into February sweeps and on Sunday night).
I could give chapter and verse of what I love of the Oscars; [...]

In this quirky, personality-driven, iconoclastic corner of the media universe, any kind of year-end list-building runs up hard against two competing factors that tear at any kind of universality: as middle-brow armchair critics, our tastes are rather catholic, but our production is - in the kindest sense - distinctly idiosyncratic.
We write about what we want [...]

Earlier this month I wrote about my favorite album of the year, Stay Positive by The Hold Steady. Today a flyover look at the best of the rest.
Vampire Weekend.  Before the government’s decisions to let the Lehman Brothers fail turned a snowballing financial crisis into an avalanche and turned a tough year into a grim [...]

I haven’t posted in newcritics in far too long, in part because of teaching and writing obligations, but in the spirit of year-end list-making, I thought I’d share some recent reflections I posted on the practice of popular culture list-making over at The Chutry Experiment.

With the end of the calendar year fast approaching and end [...]

I’ve long since given up any pretense come December of being able to think in any comprehensive way about the *best* music of the year. There’s just too much new music released every year to an audience too scattered for a marketplace too micro-targeted and boutiqued for me to claim I can tell anyone what’s [...]