The Academy Awards are undeniably the most-watched awards show on television, but that’s a little like being the world’s tallest midget. Progressively irrelevant, not much fun, out of touch with their audience, and sporting an increasingly threadbare glamour, the Oscars ceremony is the SAT of television. It’s not fun, you’re told repeatedly that it doesn’t matter, but every year you grit your teeth and endure it. This year the Academy has gambled their remaining credibility on pushing a slate of Best Picture nominees that are not only deeply political but also wildly unpopular at the box office.

Only the Superbowl, with 90 million viewers, charges more per ad than the Oscars, which bills advertisers over $1.5 million for a 30 second spot. On Oscar night, you can be sure we’ll all be reminded that the telecast is going out to “a billion” viewers, but that isn’t true. Globally, the total audience is generously estimated at about 300 million. The American viewing audience peaked in 1998 when 55 million tuned in to watch “Titanic” scoop up 11 Oscars, but since then the audience has steadily shrunk, with 2005’s telecast losing 5% of its viewers with an audience of 42 million.

Award shows can’t seem to hold onto young audiences, the most desirable advertising demographic, and they’re running out of excuses for their high ad rates.2006 has been the Twilight of the Awards with the Golden Globes reaching 18 million people, down from 27 million in 2004.The Grammy’s were stomped into roadkill by “American Idol” a show whose numbers are just a hair below the Oscar’s and whose advertising rates are less than half of what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences charges. Obviously terrified, the Academy is doing everything it can to hold onto its juicy advertising rates. Although he won’t quote numbers, the Academy’s president acknowledges he’s buying a record number of ads specifically aimed at the 18-34 demographic this year. The Academy figures that since it’s not going up against “American Idol” and because it’s plastering MTV, VH-1, and Oxygen with ads, it’ll be sure to do well this year and justify its high ad rates.

But it doesn’t matter how much publicity you have if no one wants to buy what you’re selling, and no one wants this year’s movies. The nominees for Best Picture are “Munich,” “Crash,” “Capote,” “Good Night, and Good Luck,” and “Brokeback Mountain”: a middlebrow, NPR-friendly lineup of movies that were marketed largely on their politics. And none of them was very popular. Since 2000, the five Best Picture nominees have grossed, on average, a collective $607 million. This year’s picks have now grossed a total $227 million, roughly a third of that. Although 2001 through 2003 reflect the $300 million brought in by the “Lord of the Rings” franchise, 2000 and 2004 were “Lord of the Rings” -free and they still grossed $635 million and $400 million, respectively. And it’s telling that 2000’s nominees made approximately three times as much money as the 2005 nominees with two political films (“Erin Brockovich” and “Traffic”) and with another tragic love story from Ang Lee – “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” – featuring something even more toxic at the box office than homosexuality: subtitles.

A movie’s box office isn’t an automatic sign of quality, but this year’s Best Picture nominees seem positively allergic to money. Normally, when an Oscar nomination is announced the nominee will receive a bump in business at the box office, sometimes by as much as 40%. This year’s nominees have not bounced, with both “Munich” and “Brokeback Mountain” actually seeing a decline in their box office takings when the nominations were announced.

Politics seem to have infected every aspect of the Oscars this year. In 2003, the academy disqualified “Divine Intervention” from the Best Foreign Language Film category because the Academy refused to recognize Palestine as a country. Suddenly, this year, Palestine seems to be a country and their film, “Paradise Now,” is one of the final five nominees in that same category.

The Best Visual Effects category looks like a snake pit of politics as well. The past two “Star Wars” movies were both nominated for Best Visual Effects, but this year the category has no room for “Revenge of the Sith.” It doesn’t have any room for the black-and-white, computer-generated “Sin City,” either, which, despite how you might feel about the film, is a remarkable technical achievement. Could these two conspicuous snubs have something to do with the fact that Robert Rodriguez resigned from the Director’s Guild because he wanted a co-director on “Sin City”? And while George Lucas has always had nonunion shoots, this year he ran into full-blown union trouble when Gary Oldman refused to work on his nonunion “Sith,” and Mr. Lucas wound up clashing with Stage Workers Local 16 at his Skywalker Ranch last October.

Or maybe the Oscars’ lackluster year is symptomatic of Hollywood’s faltering grip on popular taste. Hollywood made $400 million less at the box office last year than in 2004, and movie attendance dropped for the third year in a row. Movie-going might be an endangered species: The one movie that got a bump when its nomination was announced was “Crash,” the only Best Picture nominee already on DVD, which saw its sales jump 150% the week it was nominated. “Hustle and Flow” and “The Constant Gardener,” also on video, were nominated in other categories and saw a 100% jump in DVD sales.

Ever since Rob Lowe and Snow White sang a breathtakingly awful version of “Proud Mary” at the opening of the 1989 show, the Oscars have been neutered by good taste. These days the host is likely to crack a number of jokes about how boring and long the ceremony has become. Academy voters have always wrestled with whether they should be reflecting or leading the culture, and this year they seem to be trying to teach people what kind of movies they should like, rather than honoring the movies that people actually watch. It looks like a recipe for disaster: charge more for something that less people watch. The Oscars will always be with us, but this might mark the year when their power as a cultural force evaporates, and their advertisers start to ask some serious questions about what they’re getting for their money.