MUST FLEE TV: Oscar Ratings Tank with 18 Million Viewers — Third Lowest Ever.

So, in less than a decade, a show that was once something that unified our culture around our shared love of movies and had not dipped below 32 million viewers since 1974, is now unable to attract even 20 million viewers.

The only good news out of Sunday’s Academy Award show is that, at least in my opinion, the correct film took home Best Picture. I loved Anora and was pleased to see its creator, Sean Baker, break a record for personal Oscar wins for a single movie: Picture, Original Screenplay, Editing, and Director. Anora’s knock-out star, Mikey Madison, also went home with some well-deserved gold. She was nothing short of a revelation.

What’s more, Conan O’Brien was a good choice to host. He is nowhere near as toxic or divisive as Jimmy Kimmel.

Nevertheless, it might be too late to woo Normal People back. The show, as far as a telecast goes, has always been pretty awful and overlong. We were willing to put up with that, though, because we loved movies and the movies seemed to love us.

Those days are long over.

As Andrew Klavan tells Megyn Kelly, “I called it the ‘Screw You America Oscars.’ You know, it was like this kind of defiant final gasp of a dying art form. We’re not here to entertain you, we’re here to show you our virtue and how superior it is to your everyday Trumpian ideas of patriotism and marriage and love and prosperity. We’re going to show you how much wiser and higher in our virtue we are than you. We’re making movies that nobody sees about issues no one cares about and we’re going to celebrate those movies as if they were Casablanca and The Godfather.”