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?

Well, he may have a point with those last two sentences -- though I think it says more about the diminished stature of the Oscars than about the state of Sontagian "film culture." This, however, is hardly new(s). Multiplexes and home video technology altered everything back in the 1980s, and have continued to do so ever since. Movies simply don't stay in theaters long enough to make an impression on popular culture the way they once did, when a hit (mainstream or art-house) could play for months, allowing people to live with it, think about it, talk about it.

Now even the hits disappear in a few weeks, then appear in consumer video formats. People can watch them privately, but they are no longer "events." Although "tent-pole" blockbusters are still sought (on the production side as well as the consumer side), the crowded supply chain ensures that very little has much impact. The movies may indeed have changed, but our relationship to them has been radically transformed since the 1960s.

That doesn't bother me so much. Yes, mass culture is declining and we are becoming increasingly "niche-ified." Does it really matter so much which format has more cultural currency at any given point in time -- big-screen projections in large auditoria or HD presentations in homes? So what if television formats have eclipsed feature filmmaking in the popular imagination at this particular moment in history? Isn't that just what happens as times and tastes change, art forms evolve, technologies mutate? Maybe the old categories of "film" and "television" are no longer so distinct. Maybe they're blending together into new forms that aren't differentiated by shape, size and length -- two-hour continuous blocks versus one-hour installments spread out at regular intervals over weeks and months. Now we can watch movies and TV series as if we were reading books -- all at once or in shorter sittings, and we determine when and how and for how long we want to do it.