HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — This year's Academy Awards promotional campaign is tied to famous movie quotes, so there's a bus kiosk poster on Santa Monica Boulevard that reads: "'Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn.' The Oscars."

No irony is intended.

Yet getting people to, in fact, care — and to watch (the show begins at 6:30 tonight on ABC, Ch. 4) — has been the Academy's mission and struggle during the past several years, as competing awards shows have been stealing the Oscars' thunder while the Academy Awards red carpet has become just one — albeit an especially fabulous one — in an ever-growing line of celebrity fashion shows. The Academy attempted to re-establish the show's dominance in 2004 by moving it from March to February, but the issues haven't done a fade-out.

Yes, Oscar hoopla lives on, but now images of nominees such as Helen Mirren and Jennifer Hudson are competing with wall-to-wall TV and Web coverage of bald, breaking-down Britney Spears and the increasingly tawdry soap opera surrounding dead bombshell Anna Nicole Smith.

"Right now they're a blip in the shadow of Anna Nicole and Britney and astronauts trying to kidnap other astronauts in diapers," said E! Online entertainment columnist Bruce Bibby, who writes under the name Ted Casablanca. "You can barely tell they're going on."

To true film fans, the worlds of the Oscars and tabloids should remain separate. The Oscars are about cinematic appreciation, not celebrity gossip, and if people become more aware of that distinction, good.

Yet to the greater public, the Academy Awards are a towering, glitzy cultural event, with the dresses, jewels, snubs and Cinderella stories at least as important as the notion of Hollywood celebrating its own artistry. So in an age when a model's death attracts far more interest than ex-President Gerald Ford's, it's fair to ask:

How culturally relevant are the Oscars?

"It's the prom night for the film industry," Mirren, the best actress front-runner for "The Queen," said at Thursday night's Miramax party. "It's become a global phenomenon.... It's the culmination of (the Academy's) efforts to draw attention to film and film as an industry and as a profession.

"But what it means culturally, society is spinning out of control, and now there are so many side issues related to it: the parties, the marketing, the gifts — all kinds of things. I couldn't define that in one go."

Peter O'Toole, who's on his eighth best actor nomination (with no wins so far) for "Venus," said at the Miramax party that since his first nomination for 1962's "Lawrence of Arabia," he is sure of one thing about Oscar hoopla: "It has increased. It was always very big. Always. In terms of popularity, in terms of the world, it's a symbol. The world knows the Oscar as well as they know the Union Jack or the Stars & Stripes. It's one of the images of our times."