What's more, the biggest hit of 1997 swept the Oscars the following year. I'm not the biggest Titanic fan in the world, but it gave moviegoing masses what they

What's more, the biggest hit of 1997 swept the Oscars the following year. I'm not the biggest Titanic fan in the world, but it gave moviegoing masses what they craved: spectacle and pathos. And it was considered the best film of the year just for doing that with aplomb. It was very Old Hollywood in a sense. These days, "blockbusters" are thought of as just expensive-to-produce slop for the lumpenproletariat, so the studios treat them as such. No one wants to produce a blockbuster with the sort of care and attention to detail that went into, say, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Or even Titanic. What's worse is that comedy is a minefield, as somebody somewhere is bound to be offended and launch a cancel campaign. So comedy films, including the once-beloved rom com, just don't get produced anymore like they used to. Any attempts at humor in movies has to be rolled in to something else -- superheroes talking in aggressively annoying Whedonese and the like -- and housewives must content themselves with Hallmark Channel glurge. And what humor is there is cringey as fuck because it's either entirely toothless or it's a "Straight white men, am I right?" type of thing because you are still allowed -- and encouraged -- to mock that group. I mean, the normally sequel-averse Jim Carrey came back to do three movies about a video game hedgehog because those are the only movies being made in which he gets to flat-out do Jim Carrey stuff.