Here’s the academy’s biggest, and growing, problem: The movies winning Oscars are movies that nobody has heard about — and, as a result, nobody is tuning in.

Five or six years ago, when movies like “Crash,” “The Departed,” “No Country for Old Men” and “Slumdog Millionaire” were winning best picture Oscars, the average box-office gross for the five best-picture nominees each year was in the $50 million to $70 million range — and “Crash ”and “No Country” were among the lowest-grossing winners (adjusted for inflation) of all time. Those were the years that drove the Academy nuts. Bad enough that a movie about a guy who killed people by sticking some sort of pneumatic hammer on their foreheads won the best picture Oscar. The next year was about a slum kid from Mumbai. The ratings tanked during these years, hitting an all-time low of 32 million in 2007.

Then came the big change. In 2009, the switch did what it was supposed to do. The average gross of the films nominated for best picture went up an extraordinary $100 million, to approximately $170 million. The ratings took a jump to 41 million. On the one end you had “Avatar” — in inflation-adjusted dollars currently the 14thhighest-grossing film of all time— but also Pixar’s “Up” and the popular family sports drama “The Blind Side.” What won? A downer of an Iraq film called “The Hurt Locker,” which made about one-fiftieth the amount “Avatar” did in ticket sales. Its $17 million made it by far the lowest-grossing best picture in the history of the Oscars.

2010 came next. There were more respectably big-ticket, high-grossing, critically acclaimed films to lavish awards on. There was “Inception,” directed by industry darling Christopher Nolan, who’d been nominated for an Oscar already and wowed everyone with “The Dark Knight.” There was “Toy Story 3,” arguably the best-reviewed Pixar movie yet, if that seemed possible. And then “True Grit,” the closest thing the Coen brothers will ever direct to a family film.

But there was a problem: The average gross of this lineup was down to $135 million and the winner was “The King’s Speech,” an agreeably middlebrow work about primogeniture and stuttering with a disappointing $138 million total box office. The Academy ignored Nolan and the Pixar folks, and the ratings were accordingly off 10 percent, making the show another of its lowest-rated ever.

Now we’re up to this year. Let’s look at the nine nominees, “The Artist,” “The Descendants,” “War Horse” and “Moneyball” among them. The average gross has plunged by more than half of last year’s, back down to $62 million. In just three years, in other words, the box office of the Academy voters’ picks has speedily regressed to more or less what it was before the big switch. In essence, the revamping has accomplished nothing.

Short of creating an affirmative-action program for blockbusters, there’s little it can do at this point. First, the Oscars has the most integrity of any awards show. The academy runs a tight ship. Corrupt outfits like the Grammys, remember, allow a secret committee to overrule its membership’s nominations to hide embarrassments and make for a more youth-friendly show. Shenanigans like that wouldn’t fly in Hollywood.

Secondly, and worse, there’s the sequel problem. Hollywood’s love of the sequel (and movies that might produce a sequel) is well known. These films have increasingly come to dominate moviegoing. The last year a quote-unquote normal movie for adults was the year’s highest-grossing film was “Saving Private Ryan,” way back in 1998. 2007 was a landmark: The top five films were all sequels, reboots, wannabe franchises, or films based on superhero comics or toys — and there were five more in the top 20.

Well, this year, Gotterdammerung hit. In 2011, for the first time, the top-10 highest-grossing films of the year are all of that ilk. It’s hard to keep track anymore. Was the latest Harry Potter a septoquel or an octoquel? I think that was the third “Transformers” movie this year, unless I’m forgetting one. I count at least three fourquels (the latest “Twilight,” “Mission: Impossible,” and “Pirates of the Caribbean” entries); what number “Fast Five” is in the “Fast & the Furious” series I haven’t the faintest. Then there were a raft of straight-up sequels (“Sherlock Holmes,” “Hangover,” “Cars”) and the new would-be superhero franchise, “Thor.” And numbers 11 through 20 included five more sequels, reboots or superhero workouts. (“Captain America,” “Planet of the Apes,” the second “Kung Fu Panda,” the fourth “X-Men” and — wait for it — the third “Alvin and the Chipmunks,” coming in at 20.)

With very rare exceptions (the “Toy Story” sequels and not any others I can think of), no one seriously claims any of these are deserving of best picture honors. Of the top-grossing films of the year that weren’t in one of these predictable categories, the highest, “The Help,” was actually nominated for best picture. So it’s not like the members of the academy aren’t trying. It’s just that there’s nothing, really, for them to nominate in the category of high-grossing films worthy of a best-picture Oscar.

There are two Hollywoods now. One makes those cacophonous entertainments, which kids flock to see in noisy multiplexes each weekend. The other makes films for adults, which we see in the calmer art theaters or in the comfort of our own homes on home video, Netflix, or on demand. They don’t make much money, so they leverage what influence they can. One of these has been their efficient hijacking of the Oscars race each year. If you don’t overspend in production and play the awards-season game well, you can do all right financially.

It’s hard to see how this situation will change any time soon. The prognosticators this year say “The Artist”— an all-but-silent film from France with a current gross of $28 million — will win best picture; if it does, it will be the second-lowest-grossing film ever to get that award. The industry will grumble; the ratings won’t go up, and will probably plummet again. The rest of Hollywood will go back to work on their respective studio’s boffo B.O. hopefuls for 2012. One of the big studio tentpoles this summer? Universal’s “Battleship” — yes, based on the venerable family game. I doubt we’ll be hearing about it when next year’s Oscar nominations are announced.

And yet, in the months since Crystal was announced as this year’s Oscar host — his first such stint in eight years — the general reaction has been somewhere between a shrug and a wince (which, coincidentally, are two of Crystal’s go-to comedic tics). No one seems to be fully dreading his return to the Oscars this year, but no one seems really excited for it, either. “The forces of nostalgia have won out again,” sighed Gawker, which predicted “another milquetoast year.” The New York Post, meanwhile, dubbed Crystal a “hoary old host.” Perhaps the most passionate naysayer was New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis, who accused Crystal of lacking “cultural currency,” and instead suggested Madonna as a possible host (this seems impractical, seeing as Madonna’s own cultural currency is about as stable as the euro, and that she’d likely blow the show’s budget on a “Tree of Life”-inspired opening number featuring a half-dozen costume changes, three Bronx high-school choirs, and the members of Odd Future crotch-grabbing a dinosaur).

It’s easy to understand why Crystal would strike some Oscar watchers — particularly younger ones — as a lame choice. He hasn’t made a decent movie in more than a decade, and somewhere along the ‘90s, his powder-dry sarcasm was replaced with cloying self-seriousness. Crystal’s worst comedic tendencies are perhaps best exemplified by a 2006 charity appearance in which he “portrayed” an African-American musician displaced by Katrina — a mawkish miscalculation that prompted a hilariously incredulous rebuttal from radio DJ Tom Scharpling.

But a bigger reason for all the animosity-slash-ambivalence toward Crystal stems, in part, from the disappointment over Eddie Murphy’s decision last fall to abandon the job. The prospect of Murphy — once a live-wire genius, now a sadly tranquilized fart artisan —being set loose again on TV was exciting, and with middlebrow hustla Brett Ratner as producer, the show had the potential to be surprising again, even if it had turned out to be a disaster. Either way, at least we would have gotten a few decent hashtag games out of it.

Instead, the producers panicked and turned to Crystal, he of the show-tune parodies and Nicholson-needling running gags. But despite the collective, ambient meh surrounding the decision, the show producers didn’t have any other choice. Because after last year’s fiasco, the Oscars don’t need a splashy name, they need a savior. 

It won’t be the first time Crystal’s been asked to swoop in and save the day. In fact, when the Oscar producers first brought him onboard, in 1990, his mission was to not only crack “Dances With Wolves” and lambada jokes, but to perform a sort of public-image triage. The previous year’s show had opened with an astonishingly taste-deprived musical number in which Rob Lowe, Snow White and several dancers dressed as nightclub tables performed “Proud Mary” (imagine what would happen if Julie Taymor and Corky St. Clair were stuck on a Carnival Cruise ship and force-fed experimental CIA drugs). Reviews for the Lowe show were uniformly terrible, and the hope was that Crystal might represent a fresh start. His comparatively tasteful, genially funny debut routine wound up getting him rehired for the next three years.

Last year’s Franco-Hathaway show may not have reached quite the same dinner-theater nadir as the 1989 show, nor was it as bad as Whoopi Goldberg’s unadventurously vulgar 1999 stint, which also prompted Crystal to come back. But the 2010 show was widely considered a misfire, one that comes after several years’ worth of wobbly Oscar ceremonies. In fact, for the last decade or so, the Academy has been in the throes of a visible identity crisis, one brought on by an unshakable sense of encroaching irrelevancy: Ratings for the broadcast, while never fully abysmal, have yet to come near the record high of the 1998 show, when “Titanic” won best picture. And in terms of buzz, the always stuffy, always talky Oscars now compete against a glut of shock-stoking, performance-driven awards shows that dominate the TV schedules. Most young viewers, it turns out, would rather watch the day-glo dry-humps of the Grammys or the VMAs than listen to some British character drone on about how cinematography is “the dance of light.”

The Academy’s response has been to try to shake up the show in any way possible. Last year, there were the pointless backstage tweets and labored smartphone jokes. In 2010, the show opened by trotting out big-name stars like George Clooney and Sandra Bullock and displaying them like district offerings in some Dubai-set version of “The Hunger Games.”  And then there was the tacky decision to have the nominees’ pals and costars come to the stage and spout embarrassingly loving spiels; this, in a show that doesn’t exactly want for self-congratulatory behavior (even Crystal’s appearance last year was, essentially, an Oscar presentation about the greatness of past Oscar presentations).

Occasionally, such attempts to stretch the Oscars have paid off: Hugh Jackman’s 2010 musical number – co-written by “Community” creator Dan Harmon — was joyously goofy and riskily weird. And Jon Stewart’s two hosting gigs found him wittily tweaking Hollywood traditions without insulting them, as exemplified by the 2006 sketch highlighting the gay subtexts of classic old westerns. For the most part, though, the Oscars’ attempts to enliven the show have felt strained and dishonest, like a 56-year-old dad trying to get into chillwave (or a 36-year-old writer trying to joke up a sentence by dropping an outmoded underground reference like “chillwave”).

But by bringing back Crystal, the Academy members are making it clear they’ve stopped believing in evolution — at least for now. After all, this is a guy whose hosting approach has remained largely unchanged for nearly a quarter-century: He opens the night with a showbiz-specific monologue, veers into a medley of best picture-inspired song parodies, and then fills out the evening with running-joke one-liners, audience pow-wows and visual gags (in recent years, he’s also added a montage in which he digitally interacts with the nominated films). Crystal’s M.O. is reliably square, and after all of the recent trying-too-hard coolness, that squareness feels weirdly comforting this year.

And, lest we forget, Crystal is really, really good at his job. He may not be the edgiest comic of our time — heck, he wasn’t even the edgiest comic of 1986 — but he excels in a role few others would even attempt to try: that of a mass-appeal, four-quadrant satirist, someone who can examine our increasingly disparate moviegoing culture, and locate the common comedy within.

It’s a tricky task, but one for which Crystal is uniquely qualified, in part because he comes off as both an insider and an outsider. Raised in Long Island, and having broken into showbiz via stand-up and TV, he’s not wholly indebted to Hollywood studio system, but he’s not resentful of it, either. This comes through in his monologue jokes, which are packed with cozily knowing showbiz references — Julia Phillips, Orion Pictures, Jeffrey Katzenberg — but often underscored with a subtle populist zing. Because he’s pals with half the room, Crystal can get away with flaying the crowd for their greed, their self-satisfaction, their childish behavior — sometimes so quickly, they barely have time to notice (“Gentlemen, start your egos,” he barked in 2004, before quickly jumping into a musical number). By doing so, he lets the viewers at home know that, just like them, he finds this whole thing at least somewhat ridiculous. For a left coast millionaire, Crystal can be amazingly relatable.

Because of this, Crystal can often succeed where the studios’ marketing teams and P.R. execs fail, by making even the most alienating movies palatable — or at least comprehensible — to a large audience. For the 1997 ceremony, Crystal was faced with an especially unfunny crop of best picture nominees, including “Shine,” “Secrets and Lies” and “The English Patient.” None were major box-office hits, meaning they’d be unfamiliar to most home viewers (and, most likely, to some of the stars sitting in the theater).

Crystal dealt with this in his opening medley, which not only mocked the nominees, but also helped explain them: The plot of “Secrets and Lies” was spelled out using the theme to “The Brady Bunch,” while “Fargo” was synopsized via Frank Sinatra’s “My Kind of Town.” Depending on your patience for musical parodies — and your tolerance for cornball one-liners — such medleys are either lowly shtick or ingeniously idiosyncratic pop-culture satire (personally, I’m in the latter camp, having grown up on a steady regiment of “Weird Al” Yankovic, Statler & Waldorf and Mad magazine). But either way, they function as a clever framing device, allowing Crystal to draw in casual moviegoers who aren’t exactly rushing to check out the latest Mike Leigh joint.

And while Crystal is, for the most part, genial, family-friendly and mostly apolitical, it would be a mistake to write him off as completely milquetoast. At times, he’s used his hosting stint to take a few well-earned jabs at his own industry. In 1992, he scolded the Academy, albeit in musical form, for not nominating Barbra Streisand as best director for “Prince of Tides,” despite the film having been named in seven categories — a baldly sexist move, no matter what you think of the movie. (He made the same point when directors James L. Brooks and Rob Reiner were similarly overlooked, but the Streisand point was made with a far greater sense of WTF vigor.) And in 2004, he tweaked the all-powerful Weinstein brothers (“evil wizards”) as well as copyright-obsessed MPAA head Jack Valenti, noting that Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow character represented “Valenti’s worst nightmare: A slightly gay pirate.” These aren’t scathing attacks, obviously, but considering how sensitive the Oscar audience can get — this is a group that once murmured disapprovingly at an innocuous joke about Walt Disney being preserved on ice — such lines qualify as at least semi-dangerous.

For those who still need reassurance about this Sunday night’s awards, that 2004 opening is worth a look. Sammy Davis Jr. gag aside, it’s a swift, silly reminder of why Crystal got this job in the first place, and why bringing him back was the only option. No one will deny the show is in need of a serious upgrade: The music numbers never fail to drag, while the middle section grows more pear-shaped each year (and surely, there’s a more tasteful way to honor the dead then subjecting them to a posthumous “In Memorial” clap-off contest, especially when they have to compete against Rod Steiger, who I’m pretty certain has died every year since 1998). But this year, radicalizing the show will only make things worse. The Oscars need only to hit the reset button, and it might as well be by the hand of Crystal. The show he’s about to reclaim is a lot like America: a suspiciously organized democracy that’s controlled by an illuminati of grumpy old white men, and in serious danger of being outpaced by foreigners (or, at least, the Golden Globes). And, like America, the show desperately needs to correct course. Crystal may not be the leader we want, but he’s definitely the one we need.

In a striking kickoff to the two actresses’ back-and-forth awards-season competition, Davis paid a warm tribute to the woman she described as an idol, a mentor and a friend. She spoke openly about the loneliness of being an ambitious African-American actress with very few role models to follow, who had seen talented forerunners like Cicely Tyson and Dorothy Dandridge essentially kicked to the curb by Hollywood. She hadn’t been looking for a Caucasian role model, she said, but the craft and range of Streep’s work on stage and screen had always impressed her, and when they worked together on the 2008 film “Doubt” (for which both were Oscar-nominated) they became good friends. Streep’s example had demonstrated a fearlessness and generosity, Davis told us, that had opened new pathways in her personal and professional life.

Streep then took the stage to deliver a dry comic monologue in which she claimed — incorrectly, I believe — that only a minority of the critics in the room had voted for her. (I’m a member of the group, and I don’t understand its voting procedures, but Critics Circle chair John Anderson has said that Streep won a first-ballot majority.) But before she moved on to that, Streep thanked Davis for her introduction: “How remarkable, and how generous, for you to do that. This is your year.”

That was a heck of a lot of high-class dames in less than five minutes, and we were all appropriately dazzled. But looking back on that event, and Davis’ remarkable speech, I think that Meryl Streep saw what was coming more clearly than the rest of us did. (Furthermore, I think she’s 100 percent fine with it.) At that moment, she looked like the prohibitive favorite to win the best actress Oscar, both because she had given a dominating performance as a major historical figure in a big holiday-season movie, and also because she has been nominated an unbelievable 13 times since her last win (for “Sophie’s Choice,” in 1983) and at age 62 is probably close to the end of her leading-lady career. She went on from the New York critics’ award to win several other prominent critics’ groups, along with the BAFTA Award and the Golden Globe. A shoo-in, right?

Not exactly. Of course I could be proven wrong, but along with virtually everybody else who pays attention to this circus, I’m betting that Viola Davis ends up clutching one of those little gold statues on Sunday night — as much because everybody watching wants to hear her acceptance speech as because of anything she did on-screen in “The Help.” People talk about all the backstage hoodoo that goes into an Oscar campaign, and Harvey Weinstein’s admittedly amazing powers to bend the minds of Academy voters to his will. But I’m not sure we’ve ever seen an actor go out and claim an Oscar during the campaign in quite the forthright and dramatic way that Davis has.

Davis evidently decided that this was her opportunity, after a long career of stage roles and oddball supporting parts and runs on “United States of Tara” and “Law & Order: SVU,” to come out with guns blazing and let the world know who she was and what she thought. It may have been a calculated decision on some level, but she’s a ferocious, intelligent and independent-minded woman as well as an outstanding actor, and there’s nothing strategic about that. She has spoken directly about all the racial and social discomfort caused by “The Help,” and about the yearning for positive role models that sometimes limits the choices of African-American artists.

Most notably, when PBS talk-show host Tavis Smiley told Davis and costar Octavia Spencer (who is also likely to win, for best supporting actress) that he felt ambivalent about the prospect of them winning Academy Awards for playing servants, six decades after Hattie McDaniel, Davis delivered a dressing-down that violated the happy-friendly norms of chat TV. “That very mind-set that you have and that a lot of African-Americans have is absolutely destroying the black artist,” she told Smiley. “The black artist cannot live in a place — in a revisionist place. A black artist can only tell the truth about humanity, and humanity is messy, people are messy.” Smiley was clearly startled — but he was standing on the track in front of the Viola Davis Oscar Express. One can only pity the fool.

Davis has talked openly, but without a hint of self-pity, about the difficulties of being a black actress in an industry that still relies heavily on caricature and stereotype, and even about being a dark-skinned black actress at a time when, as she recently put it, “Halle Berry is having a hard time.” After she brought this up, during a Newsweek panel discussion featuring various Oscar candidates, Charlize Theron jumped in to assure Davis she was “hot as shit,” which was a nice thing to say and all but (as many commentators have observed) massively misses the point. Win or lose at this year’s Oscars, Davis won’t get offered Theron’s wide-ranging dramatic roles, from serial killer to narcissistic sexpot, and won’t get the Vogue covers or Dior endorsement deals either. If it’s any consolation — and it probably is — Theron’s “Young Adult” was a dud, and she was not nominated this year.

As far-fetched as this seems now, when Davis delivered that Manhattan introduction for Streep, she was a long way from being a for-sure nominee herself. She had appeared in a pulpy, controversial hit that had opened well before Oscar season and was aimed 100 percent at female audiences (two doses of poison for the guy-centric Academy), a movie that made a lot of money and ignited a sharply polarized debate on the history of race in America. That’s at least three strikes, maybe four — and then there was the question of whether Aibileen Clark, Davis’ character in “The Help,” even qualified as a leading role. Emma Stone’s crusading white journalist, Skeeter Phelan, is clearly the protagonist, and Aibileen is pretty much the stoical, even-tempered Robin to Skeeter’s hotheaded Batman. On the other hand, while Stone and Spencer and Jessica Chastain and Bryce Dallas Howard and all the other women in the movie chew up the scenery (and often enjoyably so), Davis delivers a performance of tremendous dignity and quiet, almost stillness. Amid all the histrionics and violence and poop-eating, Aibileen is like a Zen monk contemplating the essential emptiness of everything. She knows a great deal more than she says, and Davis communicates that nonverbally, through her carriage, her measured movements, the long pauses before she speaks.

Everything the Academy ever does can, and probably should, be viewed through a cynical lens. Nominating Davis for best actress — along with the supporting nods for Chastain and Spencer — was a way of honoring “The Help” as one of the year’s cultural touchstones while navigating around the racial controversy sparked by the film’s release. The Oscar-season script, a few weeks ago, looked something like this: African-American viewers got a rooting interest in the best actress campaign (while still being permitted, like Tavis Smiley, to deplore “The Help” on various levels), Davis got a major notch in her career belt, and Streep would go on to collect a career-spanning Oscar after a tour de force performance and many years as a bridesmaid.

Instead, Viola Davis has seized the opportunity. Not just the opportunity to stage an unlikely upset and win an Oscar, although she’s probably done that. More important, she has seized the chance to remind us that she is an immensely underutilized and underappreciated actress and one of the most outspoken free thinkers in the closed-mouthed, cliché-spouting world of Hollywood stardom. Should she be playing bigger and better parts than Aibileen Clark? Of course. Was that really the best screen acting performance of the year? Almost certainly not. But the Oscar is always about much more than that, like it or not, and someone with Meryl Streep’s social conscience and sense of drama understands that well. We’ll likely never know what Streep may have told her friend in private, but what she said in public was enough: “This is your year.” She was right.

Now, it’s also true that my reaction to all this diligent legwork by a team of at least seven Times reporters can be summarized with a colloquial phrase that begins with “No” and ends with “Sherlock.” No one who has paid attention to the Oscars or the Academy — or the American film industry at large — harbors any illusions about who’s running the show, or believes that Oscar voters have much in common with Americans or moviegoers at large. Indeed, the borderline-cruel caricature of a typical Oscar voter, often bandied about in private by journalists and publicists, is of a 70-something retired actor, certainly white and probably Jewish, who wears sky-blue slacks and white patent leather shoes and lives in Brentwood or Beverly Hills. That seems to be almost exactly what the Times investigation has revealed. If anything, I found the median age of Academy members to be surprisingly young, at 62, and the male membership surprisingly low, even at 77 percent. It’s only half facetious to say that those numbers reflect years of outreach and affirmative action.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that the Times pointedly did not inquire into the religious or ethnic affiliations of the Academy’s white members. I can’t deny being curious about the question of how Jewish the Academy is these days, and you might be able to construct a non-offensive argument for why that’s relevant information. But it’s information that ugly people would use for ugly reasons, and you can’t blame the reporters and editors involved for not jabbing a stick into that particular hornets’ nest. (Internet comment threads on this topic are likely to be bad enough without raising the subject directly.) For the record, I suspect anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists might be a little disappointed. Of course it’s true that Hollywood retains some of its traditional identity as an industry founded by Jewish immigrants at a time when other business ventures were closed to them. But I’m guessing that Jewish membership in the Academy has declined a fair bit, in relative terms.

As the Times report goes on to explain, you can’t accuse the Academy of failing to represent its own industry, which overwhelmingly remains a white boys’ club in almost every area (except public relations, long a realm of female power in Hollywood). Many areas of the mainstream film business, including cinematography, special effects work and the executive suites, still have very few women and almost no people of color. Crunching the numbers provided by San Diego State professor Martha Lauzen and the movie industry’s guilds, the Times concluded that the Academy represents women with rough accuracy among producers, directors and screenwriters, the key creative positions behind the camera. Of course this provides no answer to the larger question: Two years after Kathryn Bigelow’s big Oscar triumph with “The Hurt Locker,” why were only 5 percent of the top 250 box-office films in 2011 made by women? (Reportedly, 17 percent of screenwriters for Hollywood pictures were women, and about 25 percent of producers.)

As Steve Pond, the level-headed Oscar reporter at The Wrap, puts it, “In other words, the Academy, which is supposed to represent the best of the movie industry, is an accurate reflection of that industry in many ways.” That’s entirely true, but Pond is essentially shrugging off a larger social and cultural issue that speaks to the long-term relevance of the Oscars, or rather the lack thereof. I think we all owe a debt to the L.A. Times, however obvious the results of their work may appear, for thrusting this question front and center: How much do the creaky, crusty demographics of the Academy have to do with the fact that people don’t really care about the Oscars anymore?

I realize that I’m begging the question here on a number of levels (and for once I’m using that phrase correctly). We have nearly reached the end of an awards season more tedious, more predictable and more drawn-out than any in recent memory, and in that context it’s tough to evaluate the history or the overall viability of the whole enterprise. Millions will tune in on Sunday night to see the fabulous gowns, tearful speeches and unfortunate production decisions, of course. But hardly anyone who isn’t directly involved this year feels a passionate rooting interest. (I mean, do you?) We can predict the winners in almost every major category, with the possible exception of best actress (although I think Viola Davis has pulled into the lead.) The nominated pictures are almost all tepid and noncontroversial, neither huge popular hits nor memorable cinematic breakthroughs. (The one exception to this might be Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” which won’t win anything significant.)

In the middle of last week, about 10 days out from Oscar night, I clicked over to a major entertainment-news site to see what scurrilous and delightful tidbits they might have to offer. Among 35 or so stories on their front page, exactly two had anything to do with the Oscars: One was about an after-party that Jimmy Kimmel and Oprah Winfrey would reportedly attend (well, OK then!) and the other was about Kodak pulling its name off the Hollywood Boulevard theater where the ceremony is held. A couple of TV talk-show hosts, and the slow death of the historic American company that once made all the film movies were shot on (in the long-ago days when movies were shot on film). I think that about sums it up.

As I’ve suggested in a couple of earlier articles, I think the Academy has gradually painted itself into a cultural corner, with the Oscars increasingly devoted to middlebrow, mid-budget “Oscar-y” films that are neither mass-market hits nor indie-flavored critic’s darlings. As one reader commented in response to my recent piece on the apparent Oscar failure of “The Descendants,” what the Academy means by “best picture” is unclear. “Is it one we should admire? Is it one whose actors and directors we should applaud? Is it one people can’t stop talking about and actually want to see again?”

What the Los Angeles Times has given us is a quantifiable, demographic answer to those questions. The Academy Awards emanate from a closed universe of movie industry insiders, who are overwhelmingly rich white guys over age 50 (in the real world, one of the demographic groups least likely to go see movies in the theater). Inescapably, the awards reflect the tastes, inclinations and worldview of that audience, which goes a long way toward explaining all the portrayals of depressed middle-aged men among this year’s nominees (and the otherwise inexplicable best-picture nomination of “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”).

As recently as the turn of the century, when best-picture winners included major pop spectacles like “Titanic” and “Gladiator,” the Academy’s voters could serve as a plausible stand-in for a pretty big slice of the adult moviegoing audience. But as the entertainment universe has grown ever more niche-oriented and “narrowcasted,” and Hollywood’s global harvest of billions has increasingly come to rely on franchise movies aimed at teenagers, Oscar-friendly pictures have become their own middle-aged genre. As Steve Pond notes, the results aren’t always as disappointing as they are this year: “No Country for Old Men,” “The Hurt Locker” and “The Departed” are (at least arguably) exemplary new-school Oscar pictures. But there’s also no denying that they appeal most strongly to white men of a certain age.

One response is to say “so what,” as some people do in the Times piece. The Academy is a private membership organization, which is devoted to burnishing the image of the film industry and has never claimed to represent the public at large. It can give out awards however it wants, and people aren’t required to watch. Another might be to institute radical reforms, as suggested by 2001 best-actor winner and longtime member Denzel Washington: “If the country is 12 percent black, make the Academy 12 percent black. If the nation is 15 percent Hispanic, make the Academy 15 percent Hispanic.” It’s safe to say that Academy president Tom Sherak and CEO Dawn Hudson are going to steer well clear of both those positions, like Odysseus navigating between Scylla and Charybdis. They’ll make mumbled noises about diversity, do little or nothing in terms of concrete change, and hope to God that next year’s Oscar race has more sizzle.

Sure, the moment affected me — but there was both something Pavlovian and something willed about the way I was affected. Part of me was right there with Matt and the severely ill wife he’s learned a lot of unsettling things about, the daughters he’s just getting to know and the big decision about selling unspoiled land on Kauai to developers that still lies ahead of him. (As if anybody in the viewing audience believes for a second that George Clooney is going to do that!) And part of me was thinking, “Boy, George is really acting his ass off right here, isn’t he? I’m supposed to cry, right?”

Hardly ever in recent memory has the Academy Awards best-picture race been so bereft of drama or gossip or horse-race speculation with a week to go. I think everyone understands that in our sped-up media society the Oscar campaign just goes on too damn long, and the innate ridiculousness of all this focus on an election in which 6,000 people get to vote starts to show through. (I’d expect the ceremony to be moved to early or mid-February next year.) Even so, in most years there’s some late-breaking scuttlebutt among the industry reporters who follow this stuff and quiz Academy members off the record. We often get word that some dark-horse candidate is starting to pick up steam (à la “Crash” in 2006), or breathless reports of a tightening two-way contest (between “The King’s Speech” and “The Social Network,” or “Slumdog Millionaire” and “Milk,” or “The Departed” and “The Queen”).

This year, though, zilch. Nobody even gets to complain about Harvey Weinstein’s strong-arm tactics, because he doesn’t need them. Mitt Romney can only dream of having the aura of inevitability that has clung to Michel Hazanavicius’ “The Artist” throughout awards season. Oh, “Midnight in Paris” and “The Help” have had their Rick Santorum moments, I guess, but those faded out even more rapidly than Sen. Frothy Mixture has. So here we are, a week out from the big night in the No-Longer-Kodak Theatre, with Oscar’s big prize all but awarded to a silent black-and-white film made by French people. If we can pull that fact free of the massive ennui we’re all feeling about Oscar season this year, it remains objectively amazing. I mean, don’t get me wrong: “The Artist” is agreeable lightweight entertainment, and I can see exactly why it appeals to the wounded, nostalgic and crisis-ridden industry insiders of the Academy. Jean Dujardin is an irresistible performer, and I bet he’s been hitting the “apprenez l’anglais” CDs hard in preparation for his likely Hollywood career.

Still, the likely Oscar triumph of “The Artist,” like the movie itself, is a novelty hit, a one-off parlor trick that demonstrates the weakened cultural position of the Academy Awards and the lack of confidence endemic to mainstream American filmmaking. As a spoof and tribute to the glories of Hollywood’s silent age, “The Artist” is not especially subtle, but a lot of love and talent and pure high spirits went into making the movie, and that shows up on-screen. It’s not a great film and may not even be an especially good one, but it’s going to win the prize because it resounds with good cheer and confidence and willingness to entertain. Those are precisely the qualities usually associated with American cinema, good or bad, and precisely the qualities lacking in this year’s other nominees.

When I made a mock-proposal for an alternate-universe Oscars in which mass-market hits like the “Harry Potter” or “Twilight” movies might compete against art-house films like “Melancholia” and “Take Shelter,” I was trying to approach this same question from a different angle. Some readers assumed I was adopting some kind of bass-ackward, pseudo-contrarian Philistinism, and at least that’s a change from the usual charge that I only like lesbian war films told backward and made in Hungarian. Please note that I didn’t nominate “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” or “Thor,” for my imaginary Oscars — but I definitely prefer it when the Academy honors movies that don’t apologize for their own existence, and that don’t embrace a middle ground of mediocrity calculated to offend no one.

It’s patently unfair to cook this crisis of confidence down to a single donkey tail and pin it on one movie. And I liked “The Descendants.” Kind of, in parts, and up to a point. It’s got quite a few modest, nice moments of emotional honesty, one of Clooney’s best and subtlest performances (mainly when he’s not saying anything) and a pleasant, half-dissolute Hawaiian vibe. But it’s always going to be the American movie made by a name director that has George Clooney playing a bereaved husband and father, a spunky, sexy teenage daughter, slack-key guitar stylings and gorgeous tropical locations — and that lost the best-picture award to that silent movie made by French people.

Believe me, I can hear your complaints, thanks to the one-way Panopticon that allows me to observe all of you out there in Internet-land. Criticizing “The Descendants” for not being some completely different kind of movie than it actually is is even more unfair than everything else I’ve said. Sure, sure. But the fact remains that on paper “The Descendants” sounds like an absolute, surefire Oscar winner — a blend of laughter and tears; Hollywood’s most beloved male star served in a pineapple, with a little umbrella — and in practice it’s a bit of a melancholy slog, a movie with a lot of dragged-out emotional scenes and not that many laughs, a movie people like well enough without feeling passionate about.

Furthermore, it’s pointless to say that since Alexander Payne is a pretty-much-independent director who made the film he wanted to make, he’s not to blame for the fact that it’s almost but not quite an Oscar-winning movie. Let’s face it, the movie Payne wanted to make is kind of a mess, starting with that mind-bendingly awful opening narration, in which Clooney-as-Matt pretty much tells us the whole story, including exactly how he feels about it and how we should too. In fact, whenever we draw near a dangerous scene where we’re not quite sure what Matt’s thinking or how he will react, Payne halts the forward progress of the narrative (which is already leisurely in the extreme) in order to have him talk to us in that literary voice that’s not quite conversational and not quite internal. I have a hard time listening, though, over the Pounding Hammer of Obviousness.

Yes, this must be intentional. Payne is an experienced filmmaker who thinks, I guess, that he’s being mildly unconventional here, dosing his tropical Mai Tai with a little Brechtian potato vodka or something. But mostly it comes off as forced and indulgent and a little bit off — an attempt to create an Oscar moment — which is exactly what I was talking about in the big scene where George Clooney made me cry.

I cried, in a pro-forma way, maybe because I’d sat through a long movie that was supposed to deliver an emotional catharsis. But the final shot, when Matt and his daughters snuggle wordlessly on the sofa, watching TV with a tub of ice cream, moved me on a much more profound and mysterious level. That scene represented “The Descendants” at its best, when Payne isn’t trying so hard to deliver big emotions for which he’s ill-suited, and is instead finding small, silent truths. If he had made that movie all the way through, instead of laboring so conspicuously to build an Oscar vehicle — well, he might not be in the Academy Awards race at all. But at least he wouldn’t be remembered forever for failing to beat out a French film where nobody talks.