ANALYSIS: TRUE. The Oscars aren’t about popular movies. It’s time for the Academy to accept that:

Perhaps, then, AMPAS should consider the Oscars to be less of an industry celebration or an effort to reward the best films of the year and more of an opportunity to highlight its appeal to niche audiences. Look: The blockbusters can market themselves and they’re clearly having no problem finding an audience. And Hollywood, frankly, shouldn’t worry too much about resentment from mass audiences that these films aren’t getting awards consideration; we’re all grownups here, even if the grownups, myself included, are mostly watching the kiddie junk these days.

This wouldn’t solve the ratings problem, but that “problem” is really only one of self-conception; there’s no real reason to try to entice tens of millions of viewers once a year to watch what amounts to a trade show. A niche broadcast aimed at niche audiences who tend to live in urban enclaves and seek out the critically acclaimed but relatively unpopular movies that have won in recent years would also be tremendously freeing: In addition to worrying less about attaining the proper mix of commerce and art in the year’s nominees, concerns about alienating audiences via overly political speeches would go out the window.

In 2010, Rush Limbaugh dubbed the MSM as closed-circuit TV for leftwing coastal elites. Outside of the aforementioned comic book/sci-fi blockbusters, Hollywood’s product has become largely the same as the MSM’s – and note the very same adversarial relationship with their potential domestic audience, which like Hillary and Obama, Hollywood and the MSM view as deplorable people, bitterly clinging to their guns, religion and Trump.

At his Website, frequent PJM contributor Christian Toto asks if conservatives will punish Trump-hating Hollywood. But as long as the comic book and sci-fi-derived franchises, and other long-running franchises such as James Bond and Mission: Impossible keep filling theaters, what difference, at this point, would it really make, to coin a phrase?