I was even more uplifted when I read that, in placing a strong second to “Iron Man 3,” “Gatsby” only earned one-third of its box-office take from people who saw it in 3D.

Which, I guess, brings me to my annual rant about how 3D remains the major boondoggle of the 21st century.

My heart sinks every time I show up for a screening of some big summer movie (or any other movie, for that matter) and they hand me the 3D glasses. As you may have noticed, I wear actual glasses for vision correction – which means that I have to wear the 3D glasses over my own.

As it happens, I’m a scuba diver – and if I want to see more clearly underwater, I can get vision-corrected lenses for my mask. But it’s not like you can get prescription 3D glasses because there are, apparently, several different systems of 3D.

That, however, is beside the point – the point being that 3D is an unnecessary special effect. It doesn’t enhance the movie-viewing experience in any significant way. It’s just a naked money-grab by the studios and theater chains, which jack up ticket prices to reap even more of a profit than they already do by selling you 50 cents worth of soda for $5.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I have yet to see the movie that I came out of saying, “Wow, that never would have worked were it not for the 3D.”

Not that there aren’t filmmakers who have used 3D well. Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo,” James Cameron’s “Avatar” and, yes, “The Great Gatsby” all created a kind of immersive experience that added to what I was seeing. But 3D wasn’t why they were solid films.

There’s another problem with this, as well. By putting so many of the major blockbusters out in this “enhanced” form (and retrofitting classics like “Titanic” and now “The Last Emperor” with 3D), the studios are conditioning younger viewers to expect 3D as the default setting for big pictures. Eventually, ALL movies will have to be in 3D if they want to find an audience.

As much as I didn’t care for Noah Baumbach’s “Frances Ha,” I applaud him for making it in black-and-white. That’s as much a rarity these days as movies that don’t have 3D will be in years to come. There are whole generations that have no patience for movies that aren’t in color – let alone movies that don’t assault the viewer with wall-to-wall gunfights, explosions and computer-generated effects.

Hollywood is digging cinema’s grave with this new fixation on 3D. But you, the viewer, have a choice.

Choose not to buy tickets for the 3D showings of “The Great Gatsby,” “Iron Man 3,” “Star Trek Into Darkness” or any other film that tries to foist it on you.

Say no to 3D. Again and again, until the studios get the message.

I tend to apply it most forcefully when I’m watching films at festivals or when I’m sorting through DVD (or online) screeners at home. If nothing’s happening after 20 minutes, sorry, I’m out. As I’ve noted, at this particular point in our cinematic history, there simply isn’t sufficient time to watch all the movies that come my way – so I’ll take an afternoon, say, and sit down with a stack of the screeners that have piled up.

They’ve got 20 minutes to grab me. If they do, I’ll either stick with them or come back to them later on and move to the next one.

At a film festival, it’s the same thing: so many movies, so little time. So if it’s not doing it for me in 20 minutes, I’m on to the next one.

I can hear the gasps, but be honest: In most cases, you can tell in the first 20 minutes whether a movie will or won’t be worth sitting through. In some cases, you can tell in the first 10 minutes.

Not that I bail on any movie that fails to spark my imagination in that first 20 minutes. I am, after all, doing a job here: reviewing films. And you can’t really review a movie you haven’t seen all the way through. Or you shouldn’t. So I do sit through a lot of crap because that’s what the job is – sitting through the major movies, good and bad, and rendering a thoughtful opinion afterward.

But there are filters. While I’m mostly required to review the big studio films, the joy in this job is in finding the small film that is worth championing, to bring it to the attention of a larger audience. There are so many, however, that you need to sift through them to find the ones worth giving that kind of attention.

A producer once told me that similar methods are used to analyze scripts to decide which films to make. Except he used the figure of 15 pages: That’s how long the screenwriter has to grab the bored development person with a pile of screenplays to wade through and analyze. If it’s not happening in the first 15 pages, it’s probably not happening.

This, of course, raises the issue of the slow-cooking movie, the one that has subtler things on its mind than accumulating a large body count and blowing up lots of cool stuff. Even then, however, I would argue that the spark is there in that first 20 minutes of screen time.

There’s nothing, for example, in the last two hours of “Tree of Life” that wasn’t foreshadowed by the first 20 minutes. OK, so you couldn’t predict that Terrence Malick was going to suddenly show us Earth from the Big Bang up to the present day in a wordless 15-minute montage – but it was certainly of a piece with (and just as coherent as) what followed.

All of which is by way of explanation why I’m not reviewing a couple of this week’s releases that come with big names attached. Indeed, I’m not reviewing much this week, because it’s a bit of a vacation.

Timing and other assignments have meant I am missing the screenings for the week’s two biggest releases: “The Big Wedding” and Michael Bay’s “Pain & Gain.” But, under other circumstances, I probably would review “At Any Cost,” which stars Dennis Quaid and Zac Efron, and “Arthur Newman,” which stars Colin Firth and Emily Blunt (both doing flat American accents). And I’m not.

I went to see filmmaker Rahmin Bahrani’s “At Any Price” at the Toronto Film Festival last fall – and walked out after 20 minutes. I was one of the few who didn’t drink the Kool-Aid for Bahrani’s “Goodbye Solo,” one of the more overrated films of the past five years. And I couldn’t swing with his take on middle-American farmers dealing with genetically modified seeds and the changing climate of agribusiness. After 20 minutes of the kind of obvious melodrama that Bahrani seemed to be dishing up – about fathers and sons, down-home values versus shifting business ethics – I’d had enough and walked out. You’ll undoubtedly read rapturous reviews of this film when it opens Friday; large grains of salt are encouraged.

Then I tried to watch a screener of “Arthur Newman,” in which Firth plays a middle manager in Orlando, Fla., who loses his job, fakes his own suicide and takes on a purchased identity to start a new life as a teaching golf pro at a country club in Terre Haute, Ind. Talk about living the dream. But despite carefully setting up the premise, the film seemed to sputter along without truly lifting off, even with Firth’s sudden involvement with a troubled woman played by Blunt. Sorry – next.

You make choices. Not reviewing is a choice which, hopefully, has meaning of its own. In this case, it means these movies weren’t worth the time required to watch them all the way through, let alone to write a review.

He felt that I was using the term pejoratively – as though I was saying there was something wrong with any film that didn’t make a specific point of trying to connect with its audience. Though I explained that it was not meant as a slur but as a simple descriptive, he still wasn’t satisfied.

I continue to believe, however, that the term has validity, particularly as a way for critics to describe a film in a way that is helpful to the reader.

I’m not making judgments about either side of this equation. I’d say I like films that are audience-friendly as often as I do the more challenging ones. It depends on the film itself.

You know what an audience-friendly film is. It tells a story that engages you about characters you can like and root for. It doesn’t have to be just a comedy, though that’s always a helpful element. But something like “42” is the pinnacle of the audience-friendly work of popular culture – and it’s certainly not a comedy.

Yet those films – movies that seek to tell a story that uplifts or inspires – often get short shrift from critics for that reason alone. This week, for example, “42” is being slagged by some critics for being manipulative – as though all movies are not manipulative to one degree or another. “42” happens to be a well-made and extremely involving story about an important moment in history. The fact that it works on the viewer emotionally, however, is often seen as a negative by critics who aren’t comfortable with movies that deal with feelings, rather than ideas or theories.

I don’t think those particular elements – a story you can follow, characters you like and root for – are disqualifiers for a film that can be exciting, entertaining, even mystifying. That’s the bread-and-butter of the box-office chart: movies that appeal to an audience. To too many critics, however, appealing to an audience and pandering to it are inextricably linked. That’s as much an erroneous generalization as saying that all films that go in the opposite direction are the only true art: plotless character studies, impressionistic slices of life, nonlinear puzzle films.

Those are the films I would classify as not being audience-friendly. They don’t offer themselves to the viewer; indeed, they force the viewer to dig in and excavate meaning for himself. Or not. The plot isn’t necessarily a plot, the characters aren’t necessarily likable (or even understandable) – indeed, the characters sometimes are not even characters. Consider Terrence Malick’s “To the Wonder,” opening today, in which the actors are almost an afterthought.

There is an audience for those films, films as disparate as Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” (quiet, sharply observed father-daughter tale, minus a real story) and David Chase’s “Not Fade Away” (snapshot-glimpses of the music of an era from the viewpoint of multiple characters, again driven by character rather than plot).

Just as there is, no doubt, an audience for “To the Wonder” and Shane Carruth’s “Upstream Color,” which opened to an 84 percent “Fresh” rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes last week.

But those Rotten Tomato ratings can be deceptive. RT critics, after all, were at 92 percent “Fresh” for “Room 237,” 90 for “Holy Motors,” and 86 percent for “The Master.”

All of those were movies that were not audience-friendly. Most of them were barely watchable. But if you read those reviews, you would find little that’s descriptive of what the movie actually looks or feels like while you’re watching it. Which, for a lot of people, was a negative experience in the case of those particular titles.

How many people saw them because of positive reviews that were misleading? How many might have thought twice if the review mentioned that, oh, well, this film is all but incomprehensible, even if you’ve read a director’s statement on what it means? Or, well, this movie has very little dialogue and takes a 20-minute break for a flashback to the beginning of time? Or this movie is about an inarticulate movie star caught in moments by himself during a movie junket?

Critics have a duty to be clear with readers. Not to warn them, per se, because, again, that implies something about relative merit. But to be clear or honest: This is a movie in which nothing much happens. Or this is a movie in which what does happen doesn’t make a lot of sense. Or is deliberately off-putting or upsetting.

At which point, the critic says: And this is why I think you should pay attention anyway.

That’s the critic’s role – to identify something that seems off-putting or uninteresting and share your passion for it.

Obfuscating it, however, doesn’t do anyone a favor. You don’t get people to interact with and, perhaps, develop an appetite for unconventional or form-breaking work by tricking them into seeing it. You do it by describing it honestly and accurately, in the hope that your description fires a reader’s imagination in some way.

Describing a film as not being particularly audience-friendly is a step in the right direction. It’s not an insult; it’s an adjective.

It’s that rare evening of theater where something that was already familiar becomes new, yielding unexpected meaning and feelings.

It’s not as if I’ve made a study of “Hamlet.” But I’ve seen probably a dozen different versions, on stage and film. That’s something you do on purpose, because not many people do it voluntarily (and I consider that a failure of the American education system).

Still, when I saw Paul Giamatti play “Hamlet” recently at the Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven (a sold-out run that ends this weekend), I felt like I was hearing Shakespeare’s language for the first time.

While I’ve seen modern-dress Shakespeare that I thought was effective, I can’t remember a version that felt more contemporary. Director James Bundy, Yale Rep’s artistic director, costumes the actors in clothes from different 20th-Century eras, but their interactions have a currency, a sense that these people are operating right now, rather than enacting a story written as the 1600s loomed.

That’s particularly true of Giamatti’s Hamlet, who struggles between the anguish he truly feels and the affect of sly insanity that he puts on for others. His sudden emotional outbursts, often humorous for their unexpected manic quality, have a modern anxiety and neurosis, though communicated through Shakespeare’s language.

I also liked Marc Kudisch’s Claudius (he plays the Ghost of Hamlet Sr., as well). Kudisch captured the sense of monarch as corporate giant: imperious, petty, dangerous. Even in his smaller gestures, he was channeling his inner Donald Trump – yet was convincing in moments when Claudius’ guilt gnaws at him most, as well as in his resignation at his own weakness.

Throughout, there’s a sense of modern imperative: Let’s get this done now and move on. Yet Giamatti’s Hamlet, played as an aging grad student who has lost his direction, quivers with anger and pathos. His heart is broken by his father’s death, his sense of justice riled by his discovery that the death was a murder. His mind is working too fast for its own good sometimes, even as it strings him up in a tangle of indecision at other moments.

There’s also a surprising playfulness, as though the emotion-besotted Hamlet is not too overwhelmed to realize that he’s messing with everyone’s impression of him. There’s just enough of the prankster in him to savor the impact when he actually says what he’s thinking, instead of what he’s supposed to say.

In that sense, Giamatti also lets Hamlet’s deep sense of humanity – his sense of absurdity as well as his innate decency – show through. On film, Giamatti is a transparent actor, his thoughts playing out on his face and in his eyes. Even from the distance of the stage, he still manages the feat in this “Hamlet,” surprising with unexpected tonal choices that change your understanding of a particular moment or scene.

For a show that runs three-and-a-half-hours, “Hamlet” never drags. Bundy has created a sleek production of great clarity, led by Giamatti’s thoughtful, compelling title character.

Without missing a beat, I said, “Maybe October.”

And when it happens, inevitably it will have little to do with Hollywood.

Because, really, Hollywood has abandoned the first three-quarters of the year, in terms of releasing films of quality on more than a deeply sporadic basis.

But let’s be real: In truth, Hollywood no longer cares about making good movies. Period. Quality is no longer a consideration. Full stop.

It feels like an almost weekly occurrence, if not a daily one: a breathless press release on the news page of IMDB or a bulletin from The Wrap: Bob Megastar set to star in a megamillion-dollar remake of “Some Inutterable Piece of Crap That Should Never Have Been Made Originally.”

Or Sir Sidney Superstar is onboard to headline as the villain in the latest movie adaptation of “Comic-Book Diaperload.”

Or Bill Upandcomer will be the main attraction in the latest big-screen adaptation of “That Lame ’80s TV Series” that only people under the age of 35 think was good in the first place.

This is what passes for entertainment news from the studios these days. More to the point, this seems to be the sum total of what the major movie studios are passing off as quality Hollywood entertainment. Really – that last phrase is now a painfully laughable oxymoron.

Because, at this point in movie history, the Hollywood studios are to movies what McDonald’s is to cuisine: a factory producing products that are nearly identical in their lack of depth, quality or concern for the viewing audience’s intellect.

The complaint used to be that Hollywood was dumbing things down. Now it’s just plain dumb. It might as well be administering lobotomies in the lobby of theaters as it sells tickets to “Oz the Great and Powerful” or “Jack the Giant Slayer” or “The Incredible Burt Wonderstone” or …

Well, I could list every film on the major studio schedule between now and October and not be far off.

And the fact that what passes for the entertainment press (which consists primarily of the blogosphere these days, though even the haughty high-and-mighty New York Times is not immune to this sort of hype) – the fact that they all breathlessly report each new bit of casting and each sick-making new comic-book title and TV adaptation as though it were one for the history books – none of it rises to the level of mind-boggling anymore. It is merely nauseatingly numbing.

Wow – Sir Ben Kingsley as an “Iron Man 3” villain. Golly – Robert Redford in a “Captain America” movie. Oy – Tom Cruise in a movie remake of “The Man from UNCLE” (replacing George Clooney). Urp – yet another remake of “Godzilla,” as though Roland Emmerich’s vomitous 1998 version wasn’t bad enough.

I’ll meet you at the corner of Shameless and Paycheck.

But this has been the direction Hollywood has been heading for the past 10 – if not 20 or even 30 – years. Once it became clear that teen-agers and young adults would pay to see mindless action, horror and comedy films over and over and over again, the studios stopped making anything else. They leave that to independent filmmakers, then either buy the movie for release (occasionally landing an Oscar when something like “Argo” hits) or complain when critics and the Academy give awards to small independent films that actually engage the audience’s whole brain instead of just their id.

Occasionally someone will ask me to define independent film – and I’ll say it’s film that expresses a director’s personal vision, one that means something to the filmmaker other than simply the chance to cash in.

But then I note that, unfortunately, too many makers of independent films wind up doing exactly that: using the success of their personal film to land a gig as shop foreman manufacturing some colossal piece of studio trash. Most recent cases in point: Marc Webb, who went from “(500) Days of Summer” to “The Amazing Spider-man” and now its sequel. Or Colin Trevorrow, who made the quirky but compelling “Safety Not Guaranteed” and who was recently announced to direct “Jurassic Park IV.”

Oops, here’s a bulletin: Critic rants at studios for befouling movie theaters with generic garbage.

That’s not news either.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Until they get worse.

Yes, entropy is the law of the land in Hollywood.

By my count, the New York Times ran reviews of 19 different movies on Friday, March 8. On March 15, they ran reviews of 18 more. This Friday, there are more than a dozen more scheduled to open in New York.

Every day, it seems, I get a half-dozen invitations to screenings – or, as is more often the case lately, an offer to send me a DVD screener or a link to stream the movie online.

But until I learn to DVR my life – to be able to put live-action on pause while I do something else, until I can come back to it, without actually losing the time it takes to do it – it’s both a physical and a temporal impossibility to see them all, or to even see the majority of them.

And here’s the most important thing: The majority of them aren’t worth seeing or reviewing.

There used to be filters for this kind of thing. They were called film festivals. When I go to Sundance and Toronto, the figures seem to expand each year: 2,000 films, 3,000 films, even 4,000 films submitted for entry, of which a couple hundred titles are selected to be shown. Out of those, a small (but obviously growing) percentage would actually be released.

I used to wonder: What happens to all the films that don’t get into the festivals? And all the ones that get into the festivals but never make it to theaters? The answer used to be: nothing. That was it. Those filmmakers chalked the movie up to experience, apologized to their investors (or paid them back) and moved on with their lives.

It was big news in 1987 when actor-director Robert Townsend made “Hollywood Shuffle,” by accepting all the credit-card applications he received and then maxing them out to cover the cost of making his own movie. Now that’s old hat, in this era of crowd-funding and other fund-raising schemes.

Meanwhile, it feels like the advent of video-on-demand has opened the floodgates. Movies don’t need actual physical prints (or even DVDs) to be shown anymore. Nor do they need theaters. They just go out on cable or satellite, on expanding networks of bandwidth that deal solely in this kind of product.

Some of that, of course, is by design. IFC, Tribeca Films and the like have created their own model of releasing their films in theaters on the same day that they’re available on DVD and on-demand. But they’re no longer alone, not by a long shot.

Now THAT market is being flooded. Because digital projection has eliminated the cost of a 35mm print, more and more movies are getting brief theatrical releases in New York, at theaters like the Quad and Cinema Village, sometimes after they’ve made their on-demand debut. The distributors’ hope is that, one way or another, these films will attract enough critical attention (and positive reviews) to set themselves apart from all the OTHER movies available on-demand.

But here’s the thing: There’s a reason these movies don’t get chosen for festivals or picked up by the larger independent companies for release. Most of them aren’t good enough.

Yet the combination of inexpensive hi-def cameras, editing software that can be used on a home computer and, in particular, the Internet have created a democratization that means anyone can make a movie.

The problem is this: Not everyone should.

I look at a lot of these movies as the equivalent of podcasts and webcasts. They’re vanity efforts, homemade entertainments by people who believe (rightly or wrongly) that they’ve got the talent to succeed and a message to broadcast. The current technology means they can share that message with the world at very little cost.

But I don’t listen to podcasts or watch webcasts. For one thing, there are just not enough hours in the day. Life is too short to spend time listening to people – even comedians I enjoy – ramble and spout for an hour at a time.

I laughed recently when, while watching one of my guilty-pleasure TV shows, “The Amazing Race” (yes, I can hear the comments already: Oh, but you’ve got time for that!), a pair of the contestants were identified as “YouTube hosts.” As though that distinguished them from the millions of other people who put themselves on camera and upload it to the Internet, convinced that they’re ready for the world.

But they’re not – at least not the large majority of them. Most of these wind up with audiences consisting of the podcaster’s friends and those strangers who stumble across it. Indeed, there’s a whole website, stumbleupon.com, devoted to helping people do exactly that.

While I understand the thrill in finding something unknown or undiscovered and sharing it with others (it’s kind of what my job is about), there’s simply too much chaff swirling around – in terms of podcasts, webcasts, online publications and, yes, movies – for me to devote time to searching for that one grain of wheat among the growing mountain-range of husks.

The people who champion these various endeavors will tell you that it allows the ordinary person to bypass the so-called gatekeepers and bring their work to the world at large.

At this point, however, it feels like we need more gatekeepers – and fewer gates.

And way fewer movies.

It’s called a review embargo – and it seems a little self-explanatory. But still, I’d like to take this opportunity to discuss a little movie-critic inside-baseball stuff. Perhaps we can get a larger discussion going.

For those of you not in the business, here’s the deal: Generally speaking, when critics see a film – no matter whether it is two weeks before it opens or six months – there’s an unspoken agreement with the film companies that we won’t publish or post reviews until the week the film opens. Granted, we will publish our thoughts about movies after seeing them at a festival – but that’s rarely a substitute for a full, considered review. More like taking the temperature of the festival itself.

Occasionally, however, a film company will send out screening notices with a specific embargo in force: You cannot post or publish your review until X date. It might be the week of opening, it might be two days before opening – it might be opening day itself.

Sometimes, they even ask you to sign a non-disclosure release to that effect. The understanding is clear: If you see this movie at this screening, you agree to the embargo. And they have your signature to prove it.

(Never mind that, on a movie where reviews are embargoed until the Wednesday before the Friday opening, there are favorable quotes from critics in the Sunday newspaper ads the weekend before. See “quote whore” in Wikipedia. Or check the coverage on Criticwatch.)

It’s all about controlling information – and bad word of mouth. This kind of embargo is almost never associated with a movie which is expected to be a critical hit.

Inevitably, however, there are critics who simply can’t or won’t wait, who feel compelled for whatever reason to be the first to issue their review. So they jump the embargo date and publish anyway.

Then it’s up to the film company to decide what to do with them. The punishment usually involves barring that critic from that company’s future press screenings.

But what about the rest of us, once the embargo has been broken? At what point is our agreement nullified by the fact that others have published first?

I usually let Rotten Tomatoes be my guide. Most critics either post or have their reviews posted to this aggregating site, which collects excerpts from reviews of each film as they hit the Internet.

RT only allows critics the choice of Fresh or Rotten as a film rating (which is another issue in itself, one I’ve addressed before and will come back to at another time). Once there are five reviews posted, then the film gets a score, based on the percentage of Fresh reviews it receives. If three of those five reviews are positive and two are negative, it will have a 60 percent – or “Fresh” rating (60 percent being the cut-off line between Fresh and Rotten; somehow, the equivalent of a D is good enough for the RT folks). If only two are positive, then it will have a 40 percent rating, or Rotten. The numbers change as the number of reviews expands.

When I’ve had this discussion with studios – after posting early because others had already posted – the studio publicists try to parse those reviews in different ways: Oh, that doesn’t count because it’s from a trade paper. Or that doesn’t count because it’s from international press.

But, given that it’s called the “world-wide” web, segregating trade or international publications has no meaning to the average reader looking at RT. All they see is that there are reviews and that they’re on Rotten Tomatoes.

So my rule is this: I will honor an embargo – right up until a movie has enough reviews to have a score on Rotten Tomatoes. Then I conclude that the embargo has effectively been broken and the movie is fair game for reviewing.

Obviously, the studios feel otherwise. At a screening of the film “Olympus Has Fallen,” which opens March 22, which I was seeing early last weekend in order to do an interview with one of the stars for a freelance assignment, I had to sign an agreement that I would not post or publish a review prior to the embargo date, which was the Wednesday before its opening date.

That’s fine. But when I asked, “What if other people publish reviews before the embargo date?” the publicist seemed flummoxed. She finally said, “Then they’ll be in violation of the studio’s embargo.”

And? I asked. “Umm, that’s up to the studio,” came the reply.

Look, I understand the thinking; I just don’t agree with it, for a couple of reasons.

I understand why reviews should be held until the week of opening. If you publish earlier, you’re merely teasing the reader with a review of a film that won’t be available for more than a week; instead of providing a service to the reader, you’re simply showing off your early access. And to the studios, an early review that’s positive is worthless because it’s too early – and an early review that’s negative could poison the well for the later reviews.

But these other embargoes – the ones saying no reviews until two days before or the day before or the day of opening – that’s simply about protecting the product from critical reaction. Because, believe me, though they’ll never say it, every movie company knows when it’s got a stinker on its hands. But they still have to sell it as if they mean it.

Disney, for example, had a Wednesday embargo for the Friday release of “Oz the Great and Powerful,” which limped into the Fresh column with an exact 60 percent at last count. Most major publications had little good to say about the film. And if you said it early, well, kill the messenger who bears the bad news.

Embargoes of this sort usually are only required of major studio movies that are obvious dogs (and, these days, that’s most of them; again, a discussion for another day). The thinking is obvious: Let’s delay the critics’ negative reviews as long as possible. The longer we can forestall the slams, the less likely it is that the reviews will have an impact on that crucial opening-weekend box-office.

Why not simply skip the critics altogether? Some films do, offering no screenings for critics at all for certain films. But embargoes tend to focus on big-budget movies that are being widely advertised, for which the studios want as much publicity as possible. So they make the bargain: We’ll show you the movie so you can interview the star. But you can’t review the movie until it’s too late for your review to have an impact.

So that’s my take on it. I’m going to pursue this topic with publicists and other critics and perhaps revisit it at a future date.

Classics are classics for a reason. Which puts me into kind of a contextual quandary.

I believe that the cream rises and the best of literature, film, music and the like are what last in our culture.

Yet so much mediocre art – music, films, television shows – also seems to become part of the cultural conversation and stay there, with popularity conferring respectability.

Consider “Citizen Kane,” which won ecstatic reviews when it was released in 1941 and went on to have a lengthy run atop the list of critics’ choice as the greatest movie of all time. “The Wizard of Oz” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” make the list as well.

And yet all three were commercial duds when they were first released (and both “Wizard” nor “Wonderful Life” suffered critical opprobrium). It is only through the test of time and the continued beating of critical drums that they’ve had the staying power to embed themselves as part of popular culture, venerated for quality rather than commercial success.

On the other hand, when “The Sound of Music” came out, it was savaged by critics. Of course, it went on to become one of the top-grossing films of all-time. It remains a historic commercial hit, but its critical standing also has risen – not because the movie has gotten better but the standards apparently have gotten more lax.

There are a number of possible reasons for that, just as there are reasons why bands as middling as Heart and Rush could get voted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame. Or Queen. Or any number of bands that critics disdained (and, in some cases, continue to disdain) since they first came on the scene, but which had hits that were synonymous with an era for a certain group of people. Why not just induct Hall & Oates?

It’s not that Rush didn’t have fans early on – and have even more of them now. It’s just that the band itself was always pretentious and arty and hard to listen to. I’d put them in the same category as Journey, another group that certainly doesn’t deserve Hall of Fame inclusion.

There are a lot of things that are popular and commercial, but aren’t very good. Or are just good enough. Consider Justin Bieber: It’s not that the kid isn’t talented; it’s that he’s only just talented enough.

The old bands have old fans – and now, unfortunately, they also have new ones. Guitar Hero and Rock Band are video games in which you pretend to be a musician while devoting hours to playing a video game, instead of actually learning to play an instrument. Those games’ jukeboxes are full of bad pop radio music from the 1970s and 1980s – stuff like Kansas and Grand Funk Railroad. And now that music has reached an entirely new generation, who has no context into which they could put this music. It’s part of the game so it must be good.

Or it gets played on a classic rock station – therefore, it must be a classic. That’s true whether you’re talking about a band like Styx (as dreadful a middlebrow art-rock band as you could find, at least in this country; Yes, after all, was British and could account for their pretensions that way) – or a movie like “The Goonies,” which shows up regularly as a weekend-afternoon-cable movie.

“The Goonies,” released in 1985, is a touchstone to a generation, in the same way that “Say Anything” (1989) is: a film that was a formative experience at a tender age, a movie that looked good when you were 10 or 17. “Dirty Dancing” falls into the same category.

But if you were an adult at the time they were released and saw them minus the personal-social-upheaval context of adolescence, you’d know these were popular movies, not great ones. While they happened to capture a moment, they didn’t have a lasting impact.

Yet these films became the canon to a new generation. Think of it as grade inflation, with mediocre movies getting Bs when they deserve C+, or A- when they were no better than B.

Those movies – that music – those years are as important to one generation as the movies and music of the 1960s and 1970s are to others. Neither period, however, is an end-all, be-all in itself. Each era has its moments of major transformation, whether it’s music’s big leaps, from the Beatles to punk to hip-hop and grunge, or the movies moving from the studios to the film-school-generation to the independent world and beyond.

Set those moments in the larger context of the surrounding decades and you get a better sense of their lasting power and quality as art. There’s a difference between standing the test of your memory and standing the test of time.

What seems to have gone undiscussed is the elephant in the room – why Affleck’s nomination went instead to Benh Zeitlin, who directed the wildly overpraised “Beasts of the Southern Wild.”

Cheap, amateurish and sometimes just plain hard to watch, “Beasts” enjoyed a wave of overwrought critical hosannas, going all the way back to when the film first was shown more than a year ago at the Sundance Film Festival (where it won the always-suspect grand-jury prize, frequently given to an all-but-unwatchable film). It then got a much-vaunted sneak preview at last year’s New Directors/New Films series and, by the time it was released in June, was on track to be one of the best reviewed films of the year.

I didn’t see it until a couple of weeks prior to its release, having heard it buzzed about and hyped as this magical bit of breakthrough movie-making that dealt with race, poverty and Katrina politics, all in one slight film starring a 5-year-old.

And then I actually saw it and thought, well, geez, there’s not much there and I can’t imagine what I would write about it.

Fortunately, its opening came on a week I took as vacation, so I didn’t feel compelled to review it. Indeed, I felt no compulsion to even think about it any further; it neither moved me, nor stuck with me.

Still, given the critical response when the film was released, I assumed it would be a major contender when critics groups began to vote. But while it was competitive in the category for best first film when I voted with the New York Film Critics Circle in early December, it was easily bested by “How to Survive a Plague,” the first documentary to win that award from that group.

And, as the other critics’ groups voted through the month, it never really picked up any momentum. Oh, it won a few – most promising newcomer for Zeitlin from the critics in Chicago; best directorial debut from the National Board of Film Buffs, er, Review. But there was no groundswell for “Beasts.”

Instead, I saw it as one of those films which, released in a June plastered wall-to-wall with super-hero and special-effects movies, looked so different that critics pounced on it as a palate cleanser. But even if it wowed you, it apparently wasn’t a movie that grew in the imagination after you see it, the way a few movies do. Instead, it faded and was replaced with other enthusiasms, as most movies are.

Then, along came the Academy voters, who apparently suffered the same kind of momentary contact high that critics did, and they handed “Beasts” a best-picture nomination, squandering Affleck’s directing nomination on Zeitlin.

When that happened, I popped in my awards-season screener of the film and watched it again, together with a couple members of my family who were curious because of the Oscar nominations.

When it was over, I was still baffled: What was it that these Oscar voters were seeing that so obviously was eluding me?

Instead of a charming or involving piece of Louisiana magical-realism (isn’t that phrase redundant?), it seemed mildly condescending to me: the tale of the plucky, abused and neglected black child who somehow overcomes a physically menacing father to survive the big storm and rise above, even after her father dies. It seemed like a contemporary throwback to the odious notion of the noble savage.

It was not dramatic; it was barely anthropological. And its attempt at the mythic was obvious and heavy-handed, with little Hushpuppy (Quvenzhane Wallis) and her hallucinatory visions of buffalo-sized boars with multiple tusks. I get it: They’re the dark forces of an uncaring world, converging on this forgotten little girl to see if she can survive the heaviest stuff the world can throw at her.

Wallis’ performance was honored by a number of well-meaning critics’ groups and given an Oscar nomination that would have been better spent on Marion Cotillard or even Judi Dench. Is it even really acting?

I would argue that it more closely resembles directed behavior, like playtime in kindergarten: “OK, pretend you’re angry. Now roar like a lion.” All acting performances amount to playing pretend – but not all examples of playing pretend can be considered acting performances.

There are a couple misguided Oscar forays like this every year. For 2012, however, this overrated film took up Oscar slots it didn’t deserve – and will be forgotten by this time next year.

I have, on occasion, posted rants about filmmakers and actors who I consider overrated, a list that includes John Hughes, Terrence Malick, Zooey Deschanel and Ridley Scott, among others.

And, at some point, a reader sent in a comment that said, “Why not write about someone who’s underrated?”

To which I had no good answer. It was an absolutely reasonable request. It just took me a while to figure out who to write about.

And then I saw a film called “The Way, Way Back” at this year’s Sundance Film Festival and found my subject: Sam Rockwell, one of the funniest, most original and compelling actors working in films today. And one of the most underrated, in terms of awards or the kind of big-budget roles that turn someone into a star.

I’ve been a fan of Rockwell’s since the first film I remember seeing him in: 1996’s “Box of Moon Light,” a wonderful and sadly overlooked film by the similarly underappreciated writer-director, Tom DiCillo. He played a free spirit known only as the Kid, into whose forest retreat a very uptight John Turturro stumbled, to be changed forever.

Rockwell had a run of really tasty little independent films in the mid-1990s, the kind of movies that were a staple at Sundance for a while: “Jerry and Tom,” “Lawn Dogs” (opposite a very young Mischa Barton), “Safe Men.” He inevitably played guys who tended to act impulsively and think later, loose cannons running a little wild in their own lives, their mouths more than likely to get them into trouble they could avoid but couldn’t help chasing.

When he showed up in bigger budget films – like “Galaxy Quest,” “The Green Mile” or even “Charlie’s Angels” – Rockwell played smaller but always tangy character roles, as convincing at playing a doofus as a vicious killer. He was, to quote a recurring line from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” the guy who was the “wild card, bitches!”

Oh, Rockwell can play it straight. He was a concerned parent of a demonic child in “Joshua,” and played James Reston Jr. to Michael Sheen’s David Frost in “Frost/Nixon.” He was second banana to (but still stole the show from) Nicolas Cage in “Matchstick Men” and Robert De Niro’s musician son in “Everybody’s Fine.” And he was heartbreaking as a wrongly imprisoned ne’er-do-well in Tony Goldwyn’s “Conviction.”

Yet he can still carry a film, if someone will let him. George Clooney had the good sense to cast him as Chuck Barris in his film of “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.” He was hilariously profane in “The Winning Season” and heartbreaking in “Moon,” as well as canny, weird and sensitive as the scam artist in “Choke.” He stole Martin McDonagh’s “Seven Psychopaths” from, of all people, Christopher Walken, with whom he also went toe-to-toe, oddball inflection to oddball inflection, in McDonagh’s Broadway play, “A Behanding in Spokane,” earning huge, gasping laughs in the process.

His timing, as noted, is impeccable, whether he’s playing squirrely-weird or knowing and funny. He’s perfect in the kind of roles that were the bread-and-butter of Bill Murray and Michael Keaton, in their younger days.

Indeed, you could look at “The Way, Way Back” as Rockwell’s latest answer to “Stripes” or “Night Shift”: He’s the comic engine that drives the film, making fair-to-good material seem great, just by investing in it – and then imbuing it with energy and intelligence.

Personally, I’d love to see Rockwell play the leading man in a film that lets him handle both comedy and drama, while giving him some emotional depth to roam around in. He’s a vibrant screen presence, one capable of capturing and holding the viewer’s attention without ever telegraphing which direction he might be taking things. With his rabbity smile and delightful deadpan, he can wring laughs out of weak material and mine gold from strong writing.

He’s obviously not hurting for work. But still, Sam Rockwell should be a much bigger star, someone for whom directors line up to obsequiously proffer their “A” material. He deserves it.

Because he’s that good – and that underrated.