DARGIS Hope and Carson hip? That could only be true for the 10-year-old you once were or my wonderfully innocent aunt who, also back in the day, thought it was such a shame that Liberace never got married. Mock me all you want, but I’m not saying the Oscars should become a Film Awareness Telethon; I’m just saying that a little education about its good deeds might help improve the Academy’s crummy public profile. And, for what it’s worth, a reprise of Madonna’s Totally Gay-Fabulous Halftime Revue would be bound to attract more (open) eyeballs than Mr. Crystal’s neo-Henny Youngman shtick, even without a big game. And, in answer to your question: It’s been noted elsewhere that a number of this year’s contenders for best picture are wreathed in nostalgia for bygone eras, cinematic and otherwise, including “Hugo,” Martin Scorsese’s digital ode to the film pioneer Georges Méliès; “The Artist,” Michel Hazanavicius’s ingratiating ode to so-called silent cinema; “Midnight in Paris,” Woody Allen’s Borscht Belt ode to Paris in the 1920s; and “The Help” Tate Taylor’s (and Disney’s) zip-a-dee-doo-dah ode to race relations. Only a few contenders, including Stephen Daldry’s “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close,” are set exclusively in a recognizable present. But as so many Hollywood prestige pictures have done in the past, this one radically depoliticizes its central event (Sept. 11) and turns it into ahistorical sentimental sludge.

Of course being good and being Oscar-worthy are rarely the same thing, and what matters now is hype, hysteria and Harvey Weinstein. It’s no surprise that the Weinstein Company has pushed “The Artist,” a pleasant if trivial distraction, into becoming this year’s apparent foregone conclusion. No one practices Oscar hoodoo like Mr. Weinstein, as witnessed by last year’s forgettable best picture shoo-in, “The King’s Speech,” yet another of his releases. Frankly, given his blitzkrieg approach to the Oscars, and that he’s about the only one who knows how to hijack, I mean, enliven, the tediously long march toward that seemingly endless night, the Academy should consider letting Mr. Weinstein put on the next awards show.

SCOTT I don’t begrudge “The Artist” its probable win. It’s a charming, likable movie — a movie in love with movies and its own charm and also full of the genial cosmopolitanism that the Academy tends to like. It and “The King’s Speech,” different though they are, may define what an Oscar movie is today: well made, emotionally accessible and distributed, as you note, by the Weinstein Company. People who see them mostly like them. But the movies people love — both the idiosyncratic, ambitious movies that spark passions and start arguments and the hugely popular, hugely expensive genre movies that are Hollywood’s global cash crop — have become marginal. Which could be why the Oscars seem so small these days.

DARGIS The major studios still clean up at the Oscars, only now it’s often one of their dependents — divisions like the old Disney-owned Miramax — which tend to generate heat and grab awards (well, the divisions or the post-Miramax Mr. Weinstein). From 1990 to 1999 seven of the best picture winners were released by the majors (five) or their dependents (two). The studios still have the most cake; they just cut it differently. From 2000 to 2010 seven of the best picture winners were released by the majors (three) or their dependents (four). Significantly, however, in the 1990s and ’80s every best picture winner but one was also among the Top 20 at the box office; in the 2000s, however, about a third of the best picture winners finished out of the box office Top 20.

The Academy has been accused of snobbery for nominating “small” critical darlings over populist picks, as if movies like Lars von Trier’s “Melancholia” were even in the running. If there’s a disconnect between most moviegoers and the Academy, it’s mainly because the studios now bank on their blockbusters (ostensibly for Joe and Jill Popcorn) and hang their award hopes on smaller titles (for fancy-pants elites like us), many released by their divisions. Given that cartoons and kiddie flicks have dominated the box office for much of the decade — last year 9 of the top 10 grossing releases were sequels, most juvenile oriented — it’s no surprise the Academy ignores these mass-market items. The Oscars have become the golden fig leaves that the industry wears to pretend it’s as committed to being in the quality business as it was in the past.