Patrick Goldstein offered some opinions on the writer’s strike in the LAT last week. They were grounded in fact, carefully placed in context, and explicitly presented as strategic recommendations to the writers, whose side he supports.

Nikki Finke, calm, cool and collected, burst out with a classic Nikkifit™ soon after, accusing him of carrying water for the studios. The third sentence of her response, below, is best savored if it’s read aloud Meg Ryan fashion, with increasing speed and voice pitch until the parenthetical coda, which should be delivered triumphantly, with a cute little smirk:

Usually, we [Finke is referring to she and Goldstein] coexist peacefully. But not this week. Not after that venomous screed you wrote in the Los Angeles Times yesterday berating Patric Verrone as if he’s to blame for all the ups and downs of the pre-strike and post-strike negotiations when certain moguls showed themselves to be lying scum only pretending to bargain in order to embarrass the WGA leadership in the eyes of members (a ploy which didn’t work).

“Stop shilling,’ Finke hissed in conclusion. Goldstein somehow managed to carry on. His newest column explores a pet subject of Hitsville’s, namely how, while no one was paying attention, the Oscars have strangely racheted over to, as often as not, focus on the best films of the year. These films unsurprisingly are less commercially minded than the blockbusters and often emanate from the studios’ specialty divisions or from independently financed productions.

In fact, of the five nominated directors — the Coens, Paul Thomas Anderson, Tony Gilroy, Jason Reitman and Julian Schnabel — only “Michael Clayton’s” Gilroy has a long history of work within the studio system, having written a variety of commercial thrillers, notably the “Bourne” series. The Coens have occasionally tried their hand at studio productions, but with little success. They remain fiercely independent outsiders. The same goes for Anderson, who retains total control over his films, as does Schnabel, director of “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.”

Somehow, over the past ten years, the members of the film industry has diverged sharply in their outlook on movies from the rest of America. And the Oscars definitely understate the schism: For better or worse, they are rigorously designed and carried out to represent, in fairly credible fashion, the opinions of working members of the industry; if anything, the requirements for membership and the zealous way it is guarded suggest that this is a conservative part of the industry, too.

This trend is soon going to raise real questions in the academy. Viewership of the ceremony tracks closely with the box-office grosses of the best-picture films each year. Right now, “Juno” has been 2007’s surprise hit, earning $100 million while no one was looking, and will be making money for the foreseeable future. But the next ones down are “Michael Clayton” (which has $41M and is being re-released) and then “Atonement,” at $38M and counting.

While up from the low of recent years (33 million in 2003, in the weeks after the Iraq war started), Oscar viewership has been lackluster most of this decade, hovering in the 40 million area, far below the 55 million who tuned in the year “Titanic” won. While “Juno” will have its partisans, the American heartland will not be pulling up chairs to root for a movie about an acidic pregnant teen who likes the Stooges. (They won’t be rooting, either, for the depressing time-fractured period romance, nor the one about the guy who goes around killing people with a pneumatic hammer, nor the one about the oilman who [spoiler deleted], nor the one about the lawyer.)

That all goes double for the overseas audience the academy whimsically describes as “one billion viewers around the globe.” This has big implications for the Academy’s prestige and influence in general and the money it makes off the broadcast in particular. For the next few years, the behind-the-scenes discussions in the academy are going to be about how to continue to make a lot of money off the TV broadcast of a ceremony designed to showcase the decisions of a membership that, peskily, can’t be counted on to make the right decisions for the ratings.