My, My, MY! How The Mighty Have Fallen!

The Oscars have CRASHED to their lowest viewership in history.
That's right: last night's Oscar telecast was a complete FLOP!
The telecast, nearly four hours long, stumbled 19 percent from last year. That easily makes it the least-watched Oscars in history, trailing 2008 by more than five million viewers. 

Let's face it: Jimmy Kimmel was dreadful. His jokes weren't funny; his political correctness was dreary; his hahaha preachiness was slumber-inducing and his desperate attempts to salvage the endless show fell flat.

Why has all this happened?

For one reason, it's happened because Hollywood and the Oscars have fallen hopelessly out of touch with ordinary Americans and everyday moviegoers, or at least what's left of moviegoers.

Hollywood is like a foreign country.

And, consequently, the motion picture industry is in very serious trouble.

But no one's doing anything about it because Hollywood's so tone deaf that the situation has barely been recognized.

Year after year after year Hollywood chooses to reward movies that no one watches and few care to see. It happened again this year with The Shape of Water. It happened last year with Moonlight. And not very many people saw Spotlight or Birdman or 12 Years A Slave. These were all politically correct movies that never managed to gain a significant audience because people, for the most part simply didn't care about them.

Everybody knows that La La Land should have won last year. And everybody knows that Dunkirk or Darkest Hour or even Three Billboards should have won this year.

Hollywood is lost in its own smug, pretentious, dismissive, elitist world. 

Today's stars don't care about you and I because there's no one around to make them care. There's no one to smack 'em in the face and wise 'em up because the big movie moguls and the big studios and the cooperative publicists and gossip columnists of yesteryear are all gone.

Saner heads can only prevail if there are saner heads and there are none in Hollywood anymore.

It's a veritable looney bin, much like most of the rest of California.

And the long, slow, slide is far from over.