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The 2018 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Criticism

Finalist: Manohla Dargis of The New York Times

For writing, both downbeat and uplifting, that demonstrated the critic’s sustained dedication to exposing male dominance in Hollywood and decrying the exploitation of women in the film business.

Nominated Work

Biography

Manohla Dargis is a chief film critic for The New York Times. She joined the paper in August 2004 as a chief film critic, a position she shares with her colleague A.O. Scott. Ms. Dargis has been a Pulitzer finalist three times.

Previously, Ms. Dargis was a lead film critic for The Los Angeles Times. A former film critic and editor for the alternative Los Angeles newspaper LA Weekly, she has written for diverse publications, including Artforum, Harper’s Bazaar, The Nation, Sight & Sound, Spin, Vibe and The Village Voice, where she wrote two columns about the avant-garde film scene in New York. Her work has been anthologized in “Action/Spectacle Cinema,” “American Film Critics: From the Silents Until Now,” “American Independent Cinema,” “Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary,” “Quentin Tarantino Interviews” and “Women and Film.” Her monograph on the film “L.A. Confidential” was published in 2003 by the British Film Institute.

Ms. Dargis is an instructor in the graduate film department at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, Calif., and is a former adjunct professor in the critical studies department at the University of Southern California. She is a former member of the National Society of Film Critics and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. She served on the selection committee for the New York Film Festival from 2000 to 2002.

Born in Rapid City, S.D., Ms. Dargis was raised in the East Village in New York. She graduated from Purchase College at the State University of New York in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree in literature. She has a master’s degree from the cinema studies graduate program at New York University and is working on her doctoral dissertation.

Ms. Dargis lives in Los Angeles with her husband.

Winners

Prize Winner in Criticism in 2018:

Jerry Saltz of New York Magazine

For a robust body of work that conveyed a canny and often daring perspective on visual art in America, encompassing the personal, the political, the pure and the profane. Criticism

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Criticism in 2018:

Carlos Lozada of The Washington Post

For criticism that dug deep into the books that have shaped political discourse — engaging seriously with scholarly works, partisan screeds and popular works of history and biography to produce columns and essays that plumbed the cultural and political genealogy of our current national divide.

The Jury

Alana Newhouse(Chair)

Editor-in-Chief

Lorraine Branham

Dean and Professor, S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications

Michael I. Days

Vice President and Editor for Reader Engagement

Michael Schaffer

Editor

Jay Stowe

former Editor-in-Chief

Winners in Criticism

2017

Hilton Als

For bold and original reviews that strove to put stage dramas within a real-world cultural context, particularly the shifting landscape of gender, sexuality and race.
2016

Emily Nussbaum

For television reviews written with an affection that never blunts the shrewdness of her analysis or the easy authority of her writing.
2015

Mary McNamara

For savvy criticism that uses shrewdness, humor and an insider's view to show how both subtle and seismic shifts in the cultural landscape affect television.
2014

Inga Saffron

For her criticism of architecture that blends expertise, civic passion and sheer readability into arguments that consistently stimulate and surprise.
See All Criticism

2018 Prize Winners

Investigative Reporting

Staff of The Washington Post

For purposeful and relentless reporting that changed the course of a Senate race in Alabama by revealing a candidate’s alleged past sexual harassment of teenage girls and subsequent efforts to undermine the journalism that exposed it.
See All 2018 Winners