This meme has been growing in intensity (and tiresomeness) for four or five years, ever since it became clear that new forms of media were eating away the business model of print journalism and that the elite cadre of professional cultural critics was being swamped by the blogulous hordes of InterTwitterMcGoogleyness. Do I really have to keep writing this paragraph of background explanation? I didn’t think so. Thanks! (Salt Lake Tribune blogger Sean P. Means maintains an online list of downsized film critics that now includes 65 names.)

But the last month or so has seen an outburst of self-love and self-loathing to rival the Lost Generation of Paris in the ’20s, except without all the midnight parties, bisexual love triangles and terrific writing. In a gasbaggy, glass-half-full March 31 essay about the demise of the syndicated TV show he co-hosted, A.O. Scott of the New York Times quotes Coleridge and T.S. Eliot and describes this theme as “the larger threnody lamenting the death of criticism.” Toward the end of the piece, he really gets his threnody thrumming: “Criticism is a habit of mind, a discipline of writing, a way of life — a commitment to the independent, open-ended exploration of works of art in relation to one another and the world around them.” I often enjoy Scott’s writing, and can only hope he means this stuff as droll self-deflation. It ain’t droll enough.

Scott’s article, especially coupled with last month’s announcement that showbiz bible Variety was canning its estimable film critic, Todd McCarthy, after 31 years, has occasioned more thoughtful thumbsucking than you’d find in a Montessori kindergarten. Brandeis University scholar Thomas Doherty crafted a weighty think-piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Ronald Bergan offered an articulate defense of the profession (or avocation, or line of bullshit, if you prefer) in the U.K. Guardian. A few days ago Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz got into the act, a few days late and many dollars short, rehearsing the tired old-media dinosaurs vs. blogger upstarts arguments with all the cluelessness that has made him a favored target of Salon’s Glenn Greenwald.

In a particularly unfortunate generational collision, indieWIRE critic and blogger Eric Kohn wrote a half-baked, ruminative essay on the topic for Moving Pictures magazine, which was then picked apart with jesuitical fervor on the National Arts Journalism Program blog by former Premiere critic Glenn Kenny. Subsequent exchanges on Kenny’s blog and elsewhere degenerated into name-calling and accusations of ethical malfeasance: Critics over 40 are grumpy, outmoded graybeards, running late for the 4:30 dinner special at Denny’s! Critics under 40 are balls-sucking festival shmooze-whores with no morals and no education, who think Pasolini designs sunglasses! (Disclosure: I’m on cordial terms with both Kohn and Kenny, or at least I was until now.)

I guess the apogee of all this self-regard arrives in “For the Love of Movies,” a film about film critics by critic-turned-director Gerald Peary, in which scribes from the Bronze Age to the Internet Age ponder the whithers and wherefores of their crippled profession. (It’s just out on DVD.) I won’t deny watching Peary’s movie at a festival last year with a certain queasy fascination, but then I suppose I am the target demographic. I’m pretty sure a movie about philately or corneal-transplant surgery would possess more appeal for a general audience.

As Vadim Rizov recently quipped on the IFC.com blog, the only thing missing is one of those YouTube videos where Hitler hears that film criticism is dying. I can’t provide that, but I will offer some unsolicited advice to my fellow critics all around the world: Shut up. Shut up now. Shut the fuck up and get back to work. If you’re worried that people don’t want to read your movie reviews, what in the name of Jesus Christ crucified makes you think they want to read your bitching and moaning? All this stuff is doing, at least at this point, is creating opportunities for feel-bad encounters with other anguished critics and drive-by trolls, and making you look like a bunch of ginormous great babies.

I’ve worked as a film critic, on and off, often between and around other jobs, since the late 1980s. For the last few years, I’ve been writing and blogging in a role that was closer to independent-film advocate than straightforward critic. With the departure of my dear friend Stephanie Zacharek for her new gig at Movieline (where she will be awesome), I will once again take on a larger role in reviewing movies for Salon. It’s a great gig, and I’m delighted to have it.

But film criticism, at least meaning the elite cultural institution pioneered by Manny Farber, James Agee and Pauline Kael, had a nice 50- or 60-year run, and is now a thing of the past. My opinion about whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing isn’t interesting to anyone, least of all me. Writing about movies requires no particular expertise or training, and as we’ve learned over the past decade, any idiot with an Internet connection can and will do it. Will there continue to be a market for those who can do it better than others? Probably, ultimately, over the long haul. I don’t know. It depends what you mean by “better.”

At the very beginning of my writing career, I learned one thing: Film criticism is a kind of performance, an adjunct form of entertainment. If it isn’t funny and lively and engaging, it isn’t anything at all. My first gig was writing brief reviews for a community newspaper in San Francisco, spending my own money to attend matinees and then writing them up. The rules were simple: If the publisher of the paper — a gay businessman in his 50s whom I never met in person — thought my reviews were funny, they’d get published. (And I’d get paid: $25 per movie.)

Let me make clear that I would agree with virtually any theoretical argument that a defender of old-school film criticism could make. Critics should be educated about the wider world, should know a lot of film history and a little film theory, should be more concerned with the “whys” and “hows” of a movie than with the “whats,” should seek to spark debates and disputes and challenge the audience’s preconceptions. Check, check and check. Sign me up. But reviewing movies is a lot more like performing stand-up comedy than like delivering a philosophy lecture. None of those grand ideas even begin to matter if you’re boring and you can’t write.

If I had a model, it wasn’t Kael or Agee (whom I’d barely heard of) but the late John L. Wasserman, a college dropout who became the San Francisco Chronicle’s lead critic in the ’70s. He passionately defended movies he loved, and launched wicked, hilarious, legendarily unhinged rants against those he found insulting garbage. Wasserman died on the freeway in 1979, with a blood-alcohol level of 0.26 (taking two other people with him), so he was a negative example as well. But if I went into this job with ideas about how to be a critic, it was he who put them there.

I’m convinced that writing reviews for that middle-aged businessman in that little back office on Octavia Street was valuable training. Fortunately, he thought my review of “The Secret of My Success” (with Michael J. Fox and Helen Slater) was funny, or at least funny enough for 25 bucks. A few days later I got to see two women sitting together on a Muni Metro train, reading my review and cracking each other up. It was the first real compliment I ever got, and in many ways it still means the most. Would I have been better off going to law school? That’s possible. But as long as the world lets me do this, you won’t catch me complaining.

Warner executives said they tracked “Clash of the Titans” as No. 1 for a second straight weekend, with “Date Night” trailing by about $1 million.

“I’m not complaining about it,” said Dan Fellman, head of distribution for Warner. “They’re certainly entitled to their own projection, and we’ll see. Maybe they’re right and we’re wrong. Monday will tell.”

Photo finishes are rare for the No. 1 spot at the box office, where one movie usually is the clear winner.

Weekend projections include fairly hard figures for Friday and Saturday but estimates for how much a movie will take in on Sunday. Studios base those estimates on such factors as how similar movies performed in past weekends.

Studios sometimes grumble that competitors inflate their Sunday numbers to make a debut look stronger.

“You can’t do that,” said Bert Livingston, a 20th Century Fox distribution executive. “What you do is you look up history, you come up with your best-guess scenario. The number is the number. Whatever it is, if it ends up being No. 1 or 5 or 6, we just estimate our numbers.”

Winning the top spot at the box office is a valuable marketing edge, allowing a studio to proclaim its release as the No. 1 movie in advertising through the following weekend.

Even if rankings change on Monday, it’s often the Sunday figures that linger in the minds of movie fans, who may not bother to check out the final numbers a day later.

“That’s why everyone wants to be No. 1 on Sunday, because with the Internet, by Monday, it’s kind of old news,” said Paul Dergarabedian, box-office analyst for Hollywood.com.

“Date Night” casts Carell and Fey as a married couple whose attempt to spice up their romantic life leads to misadventure after thugs mistake them for blackmailers.

“Clash of the Titans” features Sam Worthington as a warrior caught in a battle between men and the gods in ancient Greece. The movie raised its 10-day total to $110.5 million.

Running a close No. 3 was DreamWorks Animation’s “How to Train Your Dragon,” which took in $25.4 million, lifting its 17-day total to $133.9 million.

In narrower release, Vivendi Entertainment’s inspirational drama “Letters to God” opened at No. 10 with $1.3 million. The movie centers on a boy who writes letters to God to help cope with his fight against cancer.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Hollywood.com. Final figures will be released Monday.

1. “Date Night,” $27.1 million.

2. “Clash of the Titans,” $26.9 million.

3. “How to Train Your Dragon,” $25.4 million.

4. “Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married Too?”, $11 million.

5. “The Last Song,” $10 million.

6. “Alice in Wonderland,” $5.6 million.

7. “Hot Tub Time Machine,” $5.4 million.

8. “The Bounty Hunter,” $4.3 million.

9. “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” $4.1 million.

10. “Letters to God,” $1.3 million.

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On the Net:

http://www.hollywood.com/boxoffice

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Universal Pictures and Focus Features are owned by NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric Co.; Sony Pictures, Sony Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Classics are units of Sony Corp.; Paramount and Paramount Vantage are divisions of Viacom Inc.; Disney’s parent is The Walt Disney Co.; Miramax is a division of The Walt Disney Co.; 20th Century Fox, Fox Searchlight Pictures and Fox Atomic are owned by News Corp.; Warner Bros. and New Line are units of Time Warner Inc.; MGM is owned by a consortium of Providence Equity Partners, Texas Pacific Group, Sony Corp., Comcast Corp., DLJ Merchant Banking Partners and Quadrangle Group; Lionsgate is owned by Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.; IFC Films is owned by Rainbow Media Holdings, a subsidiary of Cablevision Systems Corp.; Rogue Pictures is owned by Relativity Media LLC; Overture Films is a subsidiary of Liberty Media Corp.

“People just love the film, so we’re really anticipating we’ll benefit from strong word of mouth going forward,” said Anne Globe, head of marketing for DreamWorks.

“How to Train Your Dragon,” featuring the voices of Jay Baruchel and America Ferrera in the tale of a Viking youth who tames a fire-breathing reptile, did outperform some other recent animated movies, among them “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs,” which opened with $30.3 million last September.

Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland,” which had been No. 1 the previous three weekends, slipped to second place with $17.3 million. It raised its domestic total to $293.1 million and its worldwide haul to $656 million.

John Cusack’s raunchy comedy “Hot Tub Time Machine” had a lukewarm No. 3 debut of $13.7 million. Released by MGM, the movie features Cusack as part of a group of losers hurled back by a time-traveling hot tub to the 1980s, where they have a chance to set their lives right.

“How to Train Your Dragon” pulled in 68 percent of its revenue from 3-D presentation, another triumph for the digital technology that allows theaters to show movies in three dimensions.

Yet it also highlights the limits on how much 3-D traffic theaters are equipped to handle. “How to Train Your Dragon” took over the bulk of 3-D theaters at the expense of Disney’s “Alice in Wonderland,” because the roughly 4,000 screens capable of showing digital 3-D movies is not enough to handle two full wide-release films at the same time.

“There’s no question there are not enough screens yet,” said Chuck Viane, head of distribution for Disney. “People who want to seek out ‘Alice’ in 3-D may have to travel a mile or two more than they used to. … It’s competition. I’m used to it.”

After a phenomenal 15-week run, James Cameron’s blockbuster “Avatar” lost most of its remaining 3-D theaters to “How to Train Your Dragon.” The 20th Century Fox release finally fell out of the top 10, taking in $2 million to finish at No. 11, raising its domestic total to $740.4 million. Worldwide, the movie has taken in $2.7 billion.

Another new 3-D release, Warner Bros. action tale “Clash of the Titans,” arrives Friday. While the success of 3-D movies has driven theater chains to speed up their conversion to systems that can project digital 3-D films, a screen shortage will remain for the near future.

“There is a limited amount of shelf space. It’s like a traffic jam at the multiplex for these 3-D movies,” said Paul Dergarabedian, box-office analyst for Hollywood.com. “It’s a high-class problem to have, but it’s still a problem.”

Films playing in 3-D have topped the box office for nine of 13 weekends this year, Dergarabedian said.

Overall revenues were down for the first time in a month. Domestic receipts totaled $127 million, off 13 percent from the same weekend last year, according to Hollywood.com.

For the year, revenues are at $2.6 billion, 8.8 percent ahead of last year.

Results for “Hot Tub Time Machine” came in on the low end of distributor MGM’s expectations.

“It’s not great, but it’s OK,” said Erik Lomis, head of distribution for MGM. “It had a lot of Internet buzz, so we thought it might come in a little bit higher.”

In narrower release, Sony Pictures Classics’ sex thriller “Chloe” opened with $1 million in 350 theaters, averaging a weak $2,863 a cinema. That compared to an average of $10,678 in 4,055 theaters for “How to Train Your Dragon” and $4,956 in 2,754 theaters for “Hot Tub Time Machine.”

Directed by Atom Egoyan, “Chloe” stars Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson and Amanda Seyfried in a drama about a woman who hires a prostitute to tempt her husband and find out if he’s cheating on her.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Hollywood.com. Final figures will be released Monday.

1. “How to Train Your Dragon,” $43.3 million.

2. “Alice in Wonderland,” $17.3 million.

3. “Hot Tub Time Machine,” $13.7 million.

4. “The Bounty Hunter,” $12.4 million.

5. “Diary of a Wimpy Kid,” $10 million.

6. “She’s Out of My League,” $3.5 million.

7. “Green Zone,” $3.3 million.

8. “Shutter Island,” $3.2 million.

9. “Repo Men,” $3 million.

10. “Our Family Wedding,” $2.2 million.

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On the Net:

http://www.hollywood.com/boxoffice

——

Universal Pictures and Focus Features are owned by NBC Universal, a unit of General Electric Co.; Sony Pictures, Sony Screen Gems and Sony Pictures Classics are units of Sony Corp.; Paramount and Paramount Vantage are divisions of Viacom Inc.; Disney’s parent is The Walt Disney Co.; Miramax is a division of The Walt Disney Co.; 20th Century Fox, Fox Searchlight Pictures and Fox Atomic are owned by News Corp.; Warner Bros. and New Line are units of Time Warner Inc.; MGM is owned by a consortium of Providence Equity Partners, Texas Pacific Group, Sony Corp., Comcast Corp., DLJ Merchant Banking Partners and Quadrangle Group; Lionsgate is owned by Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.; IFC Films is owned by Rainbow Media Holdings, a subsidiary of Cablevision Systems Corp.; Rogue Pictures is owned by Relativity Media LLC; Overture Films is a subsidiary of Liberty Media Corp.

In other bad news for Kathryn Bigelow’s film about a bomb disposal expert — which remains the presumptive favorite at this writing — a real-life bomb disposal expert is suing the film. Master Sgt. Jeffrey Sarver, an Iraq war veteran, claims he deserves some “financial participation in the film,” after writer Mark Boal immersed himself with Sarver and his unit during their time in combat. Boal’s time in Iraq produced a feature article for Playboy, which in turn became the basis for his “Hurt Locker” script, although he has consistently said the film’s characters are fictional. (Disclosure: Boal has also written for Salon, although not in recent years.)

Sarver argues that since the film is about him, he has rights to a portion of the profits, but in the Los Angeles Times, Boal defends his position: “There are similarities, because you’d find similarities to events that happened to lots of these guys. But the screenplay is not about him. I talked to easily over 100 soldiers during my research and reshuffled everything I learned in a way that would be authentic, but would also make for a dramatic story.” Boal goes on to say he “didn’t know there was a problem until recently, when the lawyers got involved.”

An insider source claims that an Oscar skit involving Ben Stiller, a botched translation and a blue-skinned Sacha Baron Cohen dressed as a female Na’vi, pregnant with James Cameron’s love child, followed by a Jerry-Springer type confrontation with the father, has been cut. Why? Because “producers think that Cameron is so thin-skinned he could literally walk out of the ceremony.”

To interrupt the Oscar-heavy news with festival news for a moment, the upcoming South by Southwest Film Festival in Austin, Texas, has just announced it will host the premiere of producer Robert Rodriguez and director Nimród Antal’s “Predators.” This reboot of the action-monster franchise stars Oscar-winner Adrien Brody, along with Topher Grace, Alice Braga and Laurence Fishburne. In April, New York’s Tribeca Film Festival will introduce its long-awaited move into theatrical and cable-TV distribution. TFF will be launching both Tribeca Film, a new venture that will distribute seven to 10 films a year in theatrical venues and via video-on-demand, and Tribeca Film Festival Virtual, which will screen a number of TFF features online simultaneous with their festival premieres (or “day-and-date,” to use industry lingo).

With all the attention the Oscars garner, studios are trying to match eyeballs with movie posters — even if it requires breaking the law. In Los Angeles, a building owner went to jail on $1 million bail for illegally mounting an eight-story billboard for DreamWorks’ “How to Train Your Dragon.” Apparently, the film distributor, Paramount, “won’t be held accountable.” This doesn’t make the activists happy: “I would say 70-80 percent of the ads on illegal billboards in Los Angeles are for movies and TV shows. In fact, it might even be higher than that,” said Dennis Hathaway, president of the Coalition to Ban the Billboard Blight.

“If ‘The Hurt Locker’ wins the Oscar for best picture Sunday night — and at this stage, the race is really down to either ‘Avatar’ or the Kathryn Bigelow-directed film about bomb disposal experts in Iraq,” writes Patrick Goldstein in an excellent article about the tenuous relationship between the Oscars and movies about war, “it will be the first war film to earn the academy’s top honor in nearly 25 years. In the past 40 years, only three bona fide war films have won the top Oscar — 1970′s ‘Patton,’ 1978′s ‘The Deer Hunter’ and 1986′s ‘Platoon.’”

If you’re a Lewis Carroll buff, or a film history aficionado, check out Stephen Salto’s fascinating IFC.com blog entry on the various incarnations of “Alice in Wonderland” leading up to the Tim Burton-Johnny Depp 3-D version. It features six video clips, including an excerpt  from a British silent version made in 1903 (!) and another from Bill Osco’s 1976 soft-porn rendition, which stars a Playboy cover girl and emphasizes the tag line, “the world’s favorite bedtime story … that’s finally a bedtime story.”

James Cameron is planning to rerelease “Titanic” in 2011, except this time in 3-D. On Moving Image Source, film archivist and curator Leah Churner offers another historical treatise, this one exploring the allure of watching this great ship sink over and over again throughout the 20th century. Only one video clip — but plenty of footnotes! “The first movie dramatization of the event, ‘Saved From the Titanic,’ premiered a month after the collision with the iceberg, on May 14, 1912,” Churner writes. Not only that, the film starred an actual Titanic survivor, Dorothy Gibson, “an actress with the Eclair Moving Picture Company of Fort Lee, New Jersey.” Gibson played herself, wearing the same dress she wore on the night of the disaster. Can you imagine a 9/11 movie released on 9/25?

Have you ever longed to see your favorite movies again, but for the first time? Cinematical ponders this hypothetical question. If your instant reaction is “No,” take a look at these rare photos from the original “Star Wars” series, and see if you can’t contain a bit of nostalgia.

In movie-development gossip, reports abound about “Zoolander 2,” “Gilligan’s Island,” “Indiana Jones 5,” “Space Invaders” — based on the vintage video game, of course — and a film based on the just-published novel “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.”

Charts can be nerdy, but fun at the same time. Click here to see a list of movie graphs and infographics, including “The Best Movies of All Time Map,” which resembles a map for the London tube.

Since data always presents itself as having all the answers, we’ll end with some questions:

What will it mean to be a film critic in 2010?

Has Hollywood started giving more and more of the plot away in trailers?

If Wes Anderson directed the “Spider-man” reboot, would it look like this?