Approximately 25% of “Crushed Dream Factory,” a 4.24 N.Y. Times column by Maureen Dowd:

“People are talking about the Oscars this year.

“Namely, how they won’t be watching. A lot of people don’t even realize the show, once an edge-of-your-seat American institution, is Sunday.

“Movie stars don’t exist anymore. Movies have been swallowed by TV and streaming. The theaters are on life support; even the ArcLight on Sunset Boulevard, one of the most beloved movie palaces in a town full of cinephiles, could not be saved.

“Norma Desmond’s everlasting declaration — ‘It’s the pictures that got small!’ — has never seemed more true.

“Sex, glamour, excitement and mystery are relics of a bygone era. Hollywood is now focused on worthy, relevant, socially conscious and lugubrious” — i.e., woke stuff.

“As a Hollywood writer friend of mine said after she watched Nomadland: ‘That was not entertainment. That was Frances McDormand having explosive diarrhea in a plastic bucket on a van.'”