Beyond the hype that culminates in the Academy Awards ceremony on Sunday, Hollywood is contracting, battered by the same economic forces reshaping the rest of the country. Moviegoing attendance hit a 16-year low last year. The industry is beset by rapidly changing business models: the free fall in DVD sales unmitigated by digital streaming, the independent film market that is a shadow of its former self. It all adds up to less. In Los Angeles, the number of television dramas produced last year dropped by 11.5 percent; reality shows were down 1.8 percent and sitcoms, 12.8 percent. On the feature side, the number of movies filmed here declined by an enormous 26.4 percent in the final quarter of last year.

What is less visible is the human toll of all that downsizing — the working actors, directors, writers and others like my foreclosed neighbors, trying to maintain their guild memberships, their health insurance, their mortgages. In the industry’s perverse social code, where appearances are everything, such private struggles are kept well hidden not only from public view but also within the industry itself. Failure is an affront to the accepted logic that, no matter what, Hollywood remains a lodestar of self-invention.

“People have no idea what’s going on in Hollywood now,” a prominent industry blogger told me recently when we met at what had been a favorite industry watering hole, empty that night. “There’s so little work, everyone is living off the money they made in the ’90s,” she added. “But they’re acting like nothing’s changed.”

What I heard in my neighbor’s screamed confession was the cracking of Hollywood’s social code, which insists that no matter the private terrors, one is always “great!” We are in foreclosure, we are screaming in the night, but we are awesome in the light of day and on our Facebook pages.

I wasn’t friends with my neighbor, but I have lived in Los Angeles long enough to know the accepted mores. When we said goodbye, I didn’t tell her I had heard her that night. She told me she was worn out from two years of wrangling with her bank, one of those named in the settlement deal. She was moving on, she said, moving in with a friend in some other neighborhood. In her Twitter feed, there is no mention of her foreclosure or even her move.