Their year in review

The Times' Arts section is doing its annual review of the year's best, much of which seems unalluringly foreign to me and--especially in the television and film sections, notably not in the music lists--reflective only of how white and myopic the Times' critics are as a group.

You'd think in a country that's 1/3rd non-white, in a world that's trading everything back and forth furiously, it'd be impossible for a Times critic as prominent (if tin-eared) as Alessandra Stanley to present, with a straight face, her ten fave tv shows, every one of which is aggressively all-white (go ahead, try to imagine a non-white person driving shows like Mad Men, 30 Rock, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Gossip Girl, House, The Riches, and Friday Night Lights)--with the exception of not-set-in-our-world Battlestar Galactica.

You can read it as much a commentary on tv as on the famously vacant Alessandra, except for the fact she has no awareness of that fact, and contributes to it with her passion for shows set in her world. It so fits that her favorite show of the year was AMC's Mad Men, she's essentially living 40 years in the past.

Then there's the list of Stanley's equal in cringeworthy, miss-the-point reviews, A.O. Scott, who also without irony manages to serve up a list of more-than-10 films he loved in 2007, not a single one of which stars a non-white person.

I mean, at a certain point you've got to wonder if the comedy duo of Stanley and Scott--who theoretically live in a city where 60% of the residents come from another country or have parents who do--have any awareness of how much they're missing, or if they're just keeping their heads down and hoping they can pass off their myopia as universal for a few more years.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the only Times arts field that wasn't dominated by whiteness is music, where it's possible to listen without seeing, making it easier to 'like' or 'connect with' things you wouldn't think you would.