Chances are, come March 4, you will be ensconced in front of your television watching the 90th edition of the Academy Awards, though chances are there will be fewer people watching this year than last year or the year before that or the year before that, since Oscar ratings have been steadily declining. The Motion Picture Academy tried to repair those sagging ratings eleven years ago by expanding the number of Best Picture nominees to create more rooting interest, an apparent reaction to the exclusion of “The Dark Knight,” which was both an artistic triumph and a crowd pleaser but a comic book movie nevertheless. If the effort hasn't succeeded, it is in part because Academy voters seem more fixated than ever on the kind of simple, serious, ponderous social message pictures — what the critic Dwight Macdonald once described as “midcult” after middle brow culture — that shout their good intentions, but that neither juice an audience nor wrestle with the imponderables of life that make for real art.
Why this fixation? Well, to cut to the chase, it is possible that our Jewish liberal conscience is ruining the Oscars by substituting political judgments for aesthetic ones, promoting well-meaning pictures over well-made and thoughtful ones.
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