poor American writing, and edited the 1981 collection Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline. He was one of the guests on the PBS special Do You Speak American? In addition, Bryan Garner referred to Simon as a language maven and credited him with improving the quality of American criticism. In December 2015, when Simon was 90, during the week of the premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, New York made the unusual move of republishing a review of the original 1977 Star Wars film by Simon, who blasted it:I sincerely hope that science and scientists differ from science fiction and its practitioners. Heaven help us if they don't: We may be headed for a very boring world indeed. Strip Star Wars of its often striking images and its highfalutin scientific jargon, and you get a story, characters, and dialogue of overwhelming banality, without even a "future" cast to them: Human beings, anthropoids, or robots, you could probably find them all, more or less like that, in downtown Los Angeles today. Certainly the mentality and values of the movie can be duplicated in third-rate non-science of any place or period. Legacy Writing about Simon after Simon's death, playwright and critic Jonathan Leaf said that defenders of Simon's work as a critic saw him as driven by a "dogged belief in artistic standards" while others disagreed. Leaf also relayed reminiscences about Simon shared with Leaf by the critic Howard Kissel late in Kissel's life. Awards George Polk Award for Film Criticism (1968) George Jean Nathan Award (1970) American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award (1976) Bibliography Acid Test, Stein & Day, 1963 Private Screenings: Views of the Cinema of the Sixties, Macmillan, 1967 Film 67/68, (Co-Editor) Fourteen for Now, (Editor) Movies into Film: Film Criticism, 1967-1970, Dial Press, 1971 Ingmar Bergman Directs: A Visual Analysis by Halcyon, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972 Uneasy Stages: A Chronicle of the New York Theater, 1963-1973, Random House, 1975 Singularities: Essays on the Theater 1964-1974, Random House, 1976 Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy, Random House, 1980 Reverse Angle: A Decade of American Films, Clarkson N. Potter, Inc./Crown Publishers, 1981 Something to Declare: Twelve Years of Films from Abroad, Random House, 1984 The Prose Poem as a Genre in Nineteenth-century European Literature, Garland, 1987 The Sheep from the Goats: Selected Literary Essays, Grove Press, 1989 Dreamers of Dreams: Essays on Poets and Poetry, Ivan