The audience for this year’s Oscar telecast set an all-time record for low ratings—with the lowest raw number of viewers in thirty years, and the smallest audience share since the broadcast began (at the very dawn of the TV era) in 1953. Conventional wisdom suggests that this shattering public rejection resulted from the dark, depressing and edgy nature of most of the nominated films, but the disillusionment with Hollywood goes deeper than that. It’s not just that the entertainment elite lives in its own world, far removed from every-day American realities; after all, even in its popular heyday 60 years ago, “Tinseltown” seemed like an artificial land of make-believe with larger-than-life stars completely detached from the ordinary. But in Hollywood’s Golden Age, we looked on celebrities with admiration and envy; today, we often see them with contempt and pity. The scandal-obsessed, non-stop, cable-and-internet Britney-Lindsay-Paris culture focuses on broken lives and self-destructive decadence. Like passing a car wreck, it’s sometimes hard to look away, but if we have other choices for entertainment and escape than dwelling in this dysfunctional world, we generally take them. No wonder that most Americans declined the chance to give more than three hours of their lives to visit a twisted, indulgent and increasingly weird sub-culture, inhabited by more and more deeply depressing people. .