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Not surprisingly, the bulk of these massive opening frames were in the months of summer. Kids were on vacation and the films targeted such a broad audience they could potentially be suited for everyone. As time passed, these event films fueled by saturating marketing campaigns became the routine. And somewhere along the way, the public began to get so enticed by the magnitude of a release they stopped caring if seeing the movie was actually going to be an enjoyable experience. It's as if seeing the films was no longer a choice and eventually this summer-is-the-time-where-we-see-crappy-movies mindset took hold.

This past year is a perfect example. We all got it into our heads that we had to see Transformers 2, even though we all knew it would suck. But Paramount and DreamWorks got their money, so what do they care? And we're all going to see Transformers 3. I know I will. Would Jaws and Star Wars have succeeded if they were Transformers quality? We've gotten to the point where we're constantly justifying seeing these films with, "it's not bad, it's fun!" No folks, they're bad. And we deserve better.

But all the good movies weren't just forced out of summer by Michael Bay. There was another force at work. As Batman and the studio execs were making it big by making things bigger, on the other end of things, a couple of brothers were making a name for themselves by going small. It was just as manipulative, though. The shift was so simultaneous it almost seems too perfect. In fact it was 1989, the very year Batman broke the mold, that Sex, Lies and Videotape, made by some random Soderbergh dude, grossed $24,741,667 against a budget of $1.2 million and changed independent film forever.

Bob and Harvey Weinstein preyed on that small pocket of resistance, the few holdouts that still had a palette for good films. The Weinsteins astutely recognized this audience as a lucrative untapped resource. All they had to do was find a spigot. They did, and his name was Oscar.

If a movie is nominated for or wins Academy Awards, people will see it as a brand of excellence, as good or maybe even better than a recommendation from a trusted friend. This is what drove the Weinsteins - under their entrepreneurial endeavor Miramax - an approach that ultimately turned the Awards season into a farce. Once again, they made it less about the quality of the film and more about the marketing strategy. The Weinsteins didn't just put a movie out there and wait to see if it stuck. They made you feel like if you didn't see it you'd be missing the second coming of Jim Caviezel (I make that joke all the time and I have no idea if anyone thinks it's funny. I'm sure it won't be the last).

The Weinsteins saw a way to cheat the system, or rather a better way to operate within it to achieve success, not unlike Billy Bean and his Moneyball approach to baseball scouting (I can make sports references here, right?) . However, Billy Beane didn't cheat the public's ability to enjoy baseball. With tactical positioning of release dates and carefully orchestrated campaigns so overt the term Oscar-bait had to be invented, the nominations and awards began to flood in, often maddeningly. The most glaring example of this was Shakespeare in Love's win over Saving Private Ryan in 1998. The Weinsteins saw that to win the Academy's favor, it was more important how a movie's caliber was perceived rather than its actual quality.

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