Given the undisputed cultural primacy of televised serial drama in the 21st century, making the switch to feature film seems almost as much of an exercise in nostalgia as the movie itself. I can’t help drawing an analogy between Chase’s foray into the supposed respectability of filmmaking and J.K. Rowling’s recently published (and tepidly reviewed) adult literary novel. Both works are understood to be important entirely because the people who made them have been so successful in other far more popular genres. Otherwise, they would likely come and go without anyone paying much attention. As Chase must realize, there is no way on God’s green earth that “Not Fade Away” – whether it’s good, bad or indifferent – will have anywhere near the cultural currency or impact of “The Sopranos.”

Oh, the movies themselves are still with us; I’m not implying otherwise. Despite declining attendance and lots of attendant public hand-wringing, Hollywood continues to turn a profit by cranking out massively expensive, effects-driven franchise pictures that can play around the world. As perverse as this sounds, we’re arguably in a new golden age for global cinema, at least in aesthetic terms. With the cost of making a professional-looking movie dropping ever closer to zero, aspiring directors and ambitious new films are emerging from all corners of the globe and all sectors of society.

This year’s NYFF lineup – which kicks off Friday night with the premiere of Ang Lee’s 3-D “Life of Pi,” a movie that admittedly might find a pretty big audience – features films made in Romania, Turkey, the Philippines, Zaire, Chile and Mexico, alongside your standard art-house fare from the heavy-hitter European nations. Based on everything I’ve seen so far and everything I’ve heard from others, it’s an exceptionally strong sampler of global cinema. But let’s be honest: Outside Manhattan and beyond a dwindling coterie of journalists, bloggers and obsessive film buffs, almost nobody will notice or care. The festival itself will be packed, but that’s as much about its event status as a centerpiece of New York’s fall calendar as anything else. Later on, films like Portuguese director Valeria Sarmiento’s Napoleonic War epic “Lines of Wellington” or Chinese director Song Fang’s intimate “Memories Look at Me” will be fortunate to get momentary theatrical runs in New York and Los Angeles. Other films in the festival may never again play on a big screen in the United States, going straight to VOD and DVD.

If the NYFF once seemed like a central, if rather snooty, landmark on the American cultural scene, it’s now something closer to a marginal, high-culture preservation society, more akin than ever to its Lincoln Center neighbors, the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. I have no problem with that; I love the opera and wish I could afford to go more often, as in ever. (If the film festival is pretty expensive, in moviegoing terms, at $20 to $25 for most tickets, that’s still a bargain compared to the “Ring Cycle.”) It’s just that there’s no point in pretending that movies play the same dominant role in our culture that they once did or that art-house movies of the sort the NYFF so lovingly curates have any impact at all on the American cultural mainstream.

Let me concede right now that I’m overstating the case a little for dramatic effect. But just a little. For every oddball little movie that breaks through into the national conversation – so far in 2012 that list includes “Moonrise Kingdom” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” which are strikingly similar films – there are hundreds of others that briefly get hyped by people like me and then sink without a trace. Your average episode of “Breaking Bad” or “The Good Wife” or “Louie” will generate many times more debate and conversation – more actual excitement — than all except perhaps a half-dozen movies released this year (and most of those will involve superheroes).

Film culture, at least in the sense people once used that phrase, is dead or dying. Back in what we might call the Susan Sontag era, discussion and debate about movies was often perceived as the icy-cool cutting edge of American intellectual life. Today it’s a moribund and desiccated leftover that’s been cut off from ordinary life, from the mainstream of pop culture and even from what remains of highbrow or intellectual culture. While this becomes most obvious when discussing an overtly elitist phenomenon like the NYFF, it’s also true on a bigger scale. Here are the last four best-picture winners at the Oscars: “The Artist,” “The King’s Speech,” “The Hurt Locker” and “Slumdog Millionaire.” How much time have you spent, cumulatively, talking about those movies with your friends?

Now, if you’re about to protest that what I just wrote reflects my own bias and snobbery, let me cut you off at the pass. Celebrity gossip is still with us, of course, and as I think Jesus once said, always will be. But that has long been almost completely divorced from discussion of movies or any other specific cultural products. There are certainly areas of film culture that not merely remain alive but have thrived and metastasized beyond all reckoning, especially the heated and immensely detailed discussions of all things having to do with science fiction, fantasy and comic-book movies. (This is another parallel to what happened in the publishing world, where fantasy became the mainstream and literary fiction is, commercially speaking, an afterthought.) I usually strive to avoid the term “fanboy,” but former Los Angeles Times blogger Geoff Boucher, a leading avatar in that realm, has embraced it without shame.

Then there are sites like Nikki Finke’s Deadline and Sharon Waxman’s The Wrap, which create a surprising amount of heat by covering the deal-making and backstage chessboard movements at the Hollywood studios, production companies and talent agencies. Given that film production is one of the few remaining profit centers of American industry, I certainly can’t argue that stuff isn’t newsworthy. But why anyone who isn’t directly involved would be interested remains a little mysterious. One could argue that, in our era of consumer capitalism, films have been revealed as manufactured commodities rather than works of art, and people root for certain film franchises or producers or studios in the same way they root for Apple over Samsung, GM over Ford, or the Red Sox over the Yankees.