The annual Pascall Prize is not a misspelling of the surname of the 17th century French mathematician Blaise Pascal. Instead it is a memorial to Geraldine Pascall, a Sydney critic who died suddenly from an aneurism in February 1983 at the age of 38.
It is Australia’s only major award for arts criticism. It carries with it a large cash prize, and the honour of joining a hall of fame which includes Andrew Ford, Bruce Elder, Roger Covell, Adrian Martin, Sandra Hall, Andrew Riemer, Joanna Mendelssohn, John McCallum, Alan Saunders and Elizabeth Farrelly. The award is concerned with criticism in all its forms — food to film, music to architecture.
This year’s winner is the Sydney Morning Herald film critic Paul Byrnes. In accepting the prize for 'always distinctive, mature, incisive and argumentative' work, Byrnes declared that serious film criticism was in trouble. 'The biggest reason is that the most powerful parts of the film industry want it to die and they always have … 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.'
He has a good point. Take last year. The top ten box office films were:
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest $38m
The Da Vinci Code $27m
Ice Age 2 $24m
Casino Royale $21m
The Chronicles of Narnia $21m
Cars $17m
Borat $17m
X-Men: The Last Stand $16.59m
The Devil Wears Prada $16.55m
Over the Hedge $16.3m
While I think we should take this list very seriously in terms of the cultural themes and value formation it suggests, Byrnes does not draw attention to the largest group of cinema-goers in the country: 13-30 year olds. The list indicates their desire for escapist and accessible fare, with science or animation fantasy leading the charge.
As a catholic film reviewer I note that this age group may well be absent from the pews of any or all religious collectives, but that their thirst for metaphysics. metaethics, transcendences, other worlds and other forms of being is satiated not in churches defined by such enquiries, but by less demanding, but infinitely more entertaining, celluloid temples.
My hunch is that for the majority of teenagers and young adults, the Hollywood blockbuster has always had greater appeal than the work of Godard, Eisenstein, Fellini, Kurosawa, Bergman, Cassavetes, Truffaut, Lubitsch and Lang.