IS THIS AN ATTEMPT TO STOP BEING THE PAPER OF RECORD?

One of the world’s most trusted news sources — Gawker shares that title with The Daily Show in my world — reports that Elvis Mitchell may be out at the New York Times as co-chief film critic. That would mean A.O. Scott would suddenly become the main film reviewer.

EWWWWWW. I guess Amanda Hesser is to Eurotrash as A.O. Scott is to me. There are few film critics that I can tolerate less.

I like Mitchell. His writing is clever, he’s incredibly smart, and while he can be as obnoxious and all-knowing in his reviews as any critic, he tends to give opinions, support them and make sense. Even if I disagree with his opinion on a film, at least I have an understanding for why he thinks the way he does.

While A.O. Scott is not nearly as bad as say, I don’t know, EW’s Owen Gliberman, I really have never understood how he landed a top job at the Times anyway. Those three things I just mentioned Elvis doing? Scott never does any of them. His reviews just come across as pretentious and clueless. I never know whether he actually likes or dislikes a movie because he never takes a complete stand one way or the other unless it’s a complete rave or a big-time pan — and sometimes not even then. And hey, A.O., if somehow you suddenly think that means, “Oh, the Out of Focus guy is obviously too stupid to understand my reviews …” — you write for a major metropolitan newspaper and not for Film Comment or Film Quarterly or Sight & Sound. That doesn’t mean you need to writedumb; it does mean you’re meant for mass consumption. Even Gliberman gives an opinion and is understandable. He’s often stupid and wrong and I’m often pretty certain he hasn’t actually stayed awake through the movie, but he’s not Scott who always seems like he’s being dropping names and SAT words just to say, “Hey Ma, look how smart I am.”

In fact, I rarely read his reviews anymore and almost never before I see the film. Not that it would skew my opinion one way or another; he’d actually have to take a position to do that. I did take a pass at his review of The Punisher the other day, and no matter how bad the movie might be, I have a feeling it’s more enjoyable than his boring and uninformative review of it. Besides, he doesn’t even have fun with his ratings explanations like Mitchell does, as the cinetrix highlights weekly. Instead, with Scott writing, when he tries to be funny we get …

”The Girl Next Door”is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has more swearing than the average porn movie but, when it comes to sex and nudity, more talk than action.

And I guess when he just doesn’t care, he throws in a word like “pervasive” and leaves it at that:

“The Punisher” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has pervasive violence, a few flashes of nudity, and some obscenity.

What a snore. A perfect description for Scott. Please NY Times, if you’re going to get rid of anyone, flip your choices.