Kate Coe, the blogger behind Mediabistro’s FishbowlLA, has a real problem with New York-based journalists writing about Hollywood, and she’s not shy about admitting it. The day after the Oscars, Coe savaged David Carr and Alessandra Stanley of the New York Times, and Rachel Sklar and Melissa Lafsky of The Huffington Post’s Eat the Press blog, for revealing their own personal biases, preferences and Hollywood-history blind spots in their write-ups (so, basically, acting like bloggers). “New Yorkers really shouldn’t be allowed to cover the Oscars,” the L.A.-based blogger sniped. “Maybe it’s something in that water that calcifies vital showbiz synapses. Or maybe they should drive more.”

Then, yesterday, Coe used Nikki Finke’s deconstruction of Sharon Waxman’s typically clumsy report on the battle between Joe Roth and Julie Taymor over Across the Universe as further evidence that New Yorkers should stick to their own turf. Where as Waxman painted Taymor as a poor artiste, victimized by the big bad industry, Finke defended the producers right to try to salvage a nickel from a pretentious trainwreck, and ran with the headline, “Why Did They Hire Her in the 1st Place?” The fact that Finke is a better, more thorough reporter than Waxman isn’t at issue; the attitude with which each woman relates their findings is. Finke’s “It’s just capitalism, stupid” attitude is the “correct” one. To Coe, Waxman’s dippy “why can’t we all just get along?” take is just more evidence that “New Yorkers don’t understand show biz all that much.”

I think many of Coe’s points, across both posts, are valid. Carr’s seasonal Carpetbagger blog is often insufferably twee in voice and mind-bogglingly hazy in facts. Rachel Sklar is a fine blogger and is well-suited to ETP’s usual mix of political savvy and pop culture snark, but anyone who doesn’t know who Thelma Schoonmaker is shouldn’t be blogging the Oscars. It upsets me that Gawker has turned Alessandra Stanley into such an easy target (if only because it pains me to watch the Gawker brand itself devolve into all-bullying, all the time) but the fact remains: she’s basically the Sharon Waxman of television critics. Speaking of Waxy … well, the fact that I have an entire category of this blog devoted to her bad journalism says enough.

But if Coe and I are in agreement that a lot of bad Hollywood journalism is generated by the New York Times, I’m still not willing to buy the assertion that the problem is geographic. First of all, according to her website (P.S. – who new Waxy had a blog, and why didn’t you tell me?), Sharon Waxman is based in Los Angeles (as is the Times‘ finest critic, Manohla Dargis). Second, Los Angeles certainly has its own share of sub-par entertainment journalists.

But most importantly, the isolated incidents that Coe singles out are symptomatic of a larger problem. There’s a major split in contemporary film writing, which could most easily be located at the dividing line between Critics and Reporters, but is really about Art vs. Commerce. Each of the writers slammed in those posts is guilty of failing to see “the whole equation” — in some way, they’re deficient in their understanding of The Way Hollywood Works, and often, this deficiency manifests itself in the protection of films made in the name of art over films made to please actual Americans/turn a profit.

The same syndrome is in effect when a film like Norbit gets universally bad reviews, only to demolish the competition at the box office on opening weekend. This is not a problem that we can push off on a handful of New Yorkers, as if any NYC taxpayer who pays the rent writing about movies lives in some kind of anti-capitalist, Woody Allen-stoked fantasy land, where everyone loves Bergman and can eloquently discuss the collected works of Marshall McLuhan. When Richard Roeper, the most mainstream, middle-brow of all contemporary film critics, goes on television and wonders aloud “what [the producers of Norbit] were thinking,” you know that film criticism-as-consumer advocacy is dead. Nothing short of willful ignorance can explain the critical community’s failure to acknowledge the fact that a large segment of the filmgoing audience is willing to pay to see a famous black man in a bikini and a fatsuit.

The real solution is not to trash New York in the name of a few reporters and critics who wish to ignore the historical and economic imperatives that define Hollywood, but to push for transparency about the fact that there is a gaping void between what today’s film critics do, and what the average film-goer uses to make decisions about what to consume. As a Los Angeles-bred, New York based writer who went to film critic vocational school (and then promptly threw away everything I learned when I got a job in film blogging), I think this split is great for criticism — it frees critics to be as obtuse as they want to be, to run fast and loose with niche preference and personal bias, as long as they’re completely comfortable with relative irrelevancy. It’s also great for people like Nikki Finke, who could apparently give a shit if movies are good, as long as the system keeps churning along and her sources keep returning calls.

All of that said, I agree that it would be really nice if the New York Times were to hire a real reporter or two. But what can you do?