I would mostly agree with Steven Soderbergh’s assessment that movies aren’t as culturally relevant as they were a few decades ago, but I find the advent of streaming only really kicked the irrelevance up a notch in the early 2010s. So, probably the last ten years and change.
For mainstream audiences, the act of going to a movie, with a large audience, in the dark, and being swept up by the images on-screen has been replaced by just staying home, having your phone next to you and binging Netflix.
Then again, you have box office successes like “Top Gun: Maverick,” “Avatar: The Way of Water” and “Elvis” nominated for Best Picture, that’s somewhat of a culturally “relevant” moment for movies. Maybe not enough to fully reignite it, but it’s a start. The pandemic definitely didn’t help in the shapeshift.
Soderbergh to Rolling Stone’s Marlow Stern: “This year’s [Oscars] is going to be very telling. You cannot this year say, ‘Well, they didn’t nominate any popular movies!’ You cannot say that. So, we’ll find out if that’s really the issue or if it’s a deeper philosophical problem, which is the fact that movies don’t occupy the same cultural real estate that they used to. They just don’t […] I’m sure that [streaming] is part of it. In cultural terms, they don’t matter in the same way that they did twenty years ago. As a result, especially for younger viewers, it’s not as compelling as it once was. They’re going to learn a lot this year. We all will.”