Despite an altogether unprecedented level of public apathy, on this Sunday night the Hollywood establishment will come together to participate in the granddaddy (or, to be politically correct, the grandparent) of all awards shows.

As aging baby boomers and one time protesters of the Vietnam War, many entertainment industry leaders will remember the old slogan, “What If They Gave a War and Nobody Came?”

This year, the pertinent question is, “What If They Gave an Oscar Ceremony and Nobody Cared?”

Every year, critics of this Tinseltown ritual love to pronounce the awards show as “the worst ever,” and last year (with Ellen DeGeneres as a fatally bland host, decidedly non-glamorous top acting winners like Forrest Whittaker, Helen Mirren and Alan Arkin, distracting shadow dancers punctuating the entire show, and a badly bloated running time) was certainly no exception. The reviews for the Oscar extravaganza proved almost entirely angry and negative, even though the ratings (with 39.9 million viewers) offered a slight uptick from the disastrously dismal 2006 program (where “Crash” won Best Picture). Still, the 2007 Once-a-Year-Relentlessly-Hyped-Super-Spectacular-Oscar-Event barely beat the season premiere of the weekly show, “American Idol,” that pulled 37.4 million viewers.

This Sunday night’s telecast (hosted, as in 2006, by Jon Stewart) stands little chance of overcoming the Academy’s long-term ratings slump, and the level of anticipatory public excitement is feeble to non-existent. No one needs opinion surveys to tell this story: just consider your own experience, your ongoing conversations with friends and co-workers. Without scientific proof to confirm the proposition, I’m still certain that this year will bring fewer Oscar parties, less betting on “Best Supporting Actress” (how do you pronounce Saoirse Ronan?), scant speculation at the water cooler at work, or the dinner table at home. My own reaction to this year’s rituals may be representative: in the past, I’ve covered the Academy Awards live from LA for various media outlets, or hosted popular Oscar Parties sponsored by one of our radio affiliates. For 2008, I turned down several invitations to lend my name to some Oscar event or another; in view of the undeniable absence of excitement from all quarters, that decision looks increasingly solid.

Academy Award apologists may insist that this year’s ho-hum attitude stems mostly from the uncertainty surrounding the writer’s strike; until a few days ago, no one knew whether the big stars could even attend the Oscar ceremony. Nevertheless, the underwhelming sigh of relief provoked by the strike settlement indicates a deeper problem than inconvenience associated with any labor dispute.

Last year, at least, the Academy Awards offered asked a compelling question: would acclaimed director Martin Scorsese finally break through and win the Best Director Oscar he’d so often been denied? His most recent vehicle, “The Departed,” offered a powerhouse cast (Jack Nicholson, Leonardo diCaprio, Matt Damon, Mark Wahlberg) and better commercial performance than Marty’s usual box office duds. His victory allowed the show (even with Ellen’s oddly understated and tone-deaf performance as host) to avoid identification as a total disaster. Meanwhile, the other films in prominent contention (“The Queen,” “Pan’s Labyrinth,” “The Last King of Scotland,” “Little Miss Sunshine” “Babel,” “Letters from Iwo Jima”) might qualify as worthy artistic endeavors but hardly counted as mass audience crowd pleasers.

For 2008, the choices for Best Picture and other major awards are even more removed from mainstream sensibilities, and even the titles themselves will discourage many potential viewers. “There Will Be Blood” doesn’t exactly sound like an old-fashioned, pass-the-popcorn good time at the movies, nor does “Atonement,” “No Country for Old Men,” or “Michael Clayton.” In fact, the only vaguely upbeat offering among these relentlessly grim, artfully intense offerings is a quirky comedy (“Juno”) about a pregnant high school girl trying to find an adoptive home for her new baby –not the sort of plot line (despite its admirable pro-life messages) normally devised to satisfy all those who yearn for more wholesome, family-friendly entertainment.

The disconnect between Oscar nominees and the industry’s biggest box office winners remains a daunting problem for the motion picture establishment. It’s no accident that the recent Oscar broadcast that brought by far the biggest audience came in 1998, when “Titanic” not only set records for ticket sales but also sailed away with the most prominent and prestigious Academy Awards. An impressive 55 million viewers tuned in to see James Cameron (remember him?) declare “I’m King of the World!” and to watch as the potentates of pop culture decided to anoint a movie that ordinary people had seen and liked.

Does anyone expect a similar response to the prospect of the Coen Brothers getting Oscar gold for “No Country for Old Men” (and maybe explaining the Yeats reference in their title), or to Paul Thomas Anderson (who?) claiming the prize for “There Will Be Blood”?

Of course, the producers of the yearly telecast would love it if the Academy voters found a way to honor the big box office winners with prominent Oscar nods. But this year, not even the most populist critics could make a plausible case for the towering artistic excellence of “Spider-Man 3,” “Shrek the Third,” “Transformers” or “Pirates of the Caribbean: At Wit’s End”, the money-making big four in 2007.

Of course, such sure-thing blockbusters hardly need validation or promotion from the motion picture Academy, and defenders of the Oscar process applaud the recent habit of emphasizing worthy independent and low budget pictures (“Savages,” “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”) that otherwise fail to reach a mainstream audience. Though it’s easy to respect the good intentions involved in using the Academy Awards to call attention to such quirky, adventurous work, the declining public significance of the Oscar ceremony has undermined ability of the yearly telecast to accomplish that purpose. Even though “Crash” won Best Picture in a little-seen Academy Awards broadcast in 2006, few Americans rushed out to see an audacious and intensely moving film that’s now largely forgotten.

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences produced its first award ceremony on May 16, 1929, none of the movie moguls behind the celebration planned to use such occasions to call attention to under-appreciated art films that had escaped public attention. Instead, the whole purpose of the Academy was to add prestige and a patina of “class” to big studio productions that already appealed to a mass audience. Classic Best Picture winners managed to combine lavish budgets, epic ambition, and crowd-pleasing spectacle, like “Gone With the Wind” (1939), “Ben-Hur” (1959), “The Sound of Music” (1965), or “The Godfather” (1972) . Only recently did the Academy begin making a habit of selecting Best Picture winners that clearly aimed at more limited, selective, sophisticated audiences, as did “The English Patient” (1996), “Shakespeare in Love” (1998), “A Beautiful Mind” (2000), “Million Dollar Baby” (2004) and “Crash” (2005).

In a sense, this alteration in emphasis reflected the changed status of movie-going from a wildly popular form of entertainment with universal appeal to a specialized interest appealing primarily to niche audiences (particularly young singles). The numbers tell a dramatic tale of the sharp decline in the movie-going habit. In 1930, nearly two thirds of Americans went to the movies in any given week. By 1960, with the advent of TV and other entertainment alternatives, the number had declined to about one-third. The next ten years saw a disastrous collapse in movie-going (associated, I’ve long-argued, with the new emphasis on harsher, darker, more violent fare) with weekly attendance at 40 million in the US in 1960, and losing more than half the audience by 1970 (down to weekly attendance of 18 million in the “Easy Rider”/”Midnight Cowboy” era). The motion picture industry never recovered, hovering around 25 million weekly filmgoers in recent years despite the huge increases in population. Continued...