Critic of the year – The Pascall Prize
The Herald film reviewer Paul Byrnes has won the
Pascall Prize
as critic of the year. The $15,000 award, announced in Sydney last night, came with praise from the judges for his “always distinctive, mature, incisive and argumentative” work. Accepting the prize, Byrnes declared that serious film criticism was in danger of dying out.
He said the industry had succeeded in “a huge con” that commerce was more important than art. “What has happened in the last 30 years is that great films and great box office have become entwined in a way they never were before. Since Star Wars and Jaws, the balance between audience, critic and film has shifted to the extent that much of the public now believes that a great film can’t be great unless the box office makes it great.”