Aren’t Oscarbatory films like The Artist, Hugo, and Midnight in Paris the high brow equivalent of the Transformers, easing the viewer into the same warm nostalgia bath, just with the particulars adjusted to reflect a different audience’s adolescent fixations? Might they even be even more meretricious because they rely on the borrowed auras from the canonical works/figures they reference (Méliès rather than Mégatron) to activate feelings of barely-earned recognition, which somehow invokes in the audience the false spirit of learning, or at very least, the smug satisfaction of the pub trivia warrior?
I've only seen Midnight in Paris, so I can't say about the others. But this makes some uninformed projections about the audience for these movies. On Woody Allen's movie, I've read a significant chunk of Fitzgerald (one might even say 'most' of his writing) and also of Hemingway, I've seen three or four Buñuel films, and I am passingly familiar with the work of all the painters who appear. Gertrude Stein is the only one whose work I don't know. Consequently I appreciated the movie as a middle-brow reworking on A Moveable Feast with a little additional commentary about the dangers of nostalgia. Not Woody Allen's best movie--probably not in the top ten--but still good. At all events, definitely not activating "feelings of barely-earned recognition," nor invoking in me a "false spirit of learning" (hint: they're fictional characters, not the actual real people whose names they have), nor still passing off "the smug satisfaction of the pub trivia warrior."
Instead, there really is a difference between lowbrow and middlebrow fare. The typical Oscar-nominated movie is not going to be great, in part because of the realities of what kind of movies can attract a lot of votes, and in part because very few films ever are going to be great. But they do aim and attempt at something more than simply entertaining, which is noble even when it fails (n.b.: 'noble even when it fails' does not equate to 'good'). Midnight in Paris and Transformers do not bear the relation to each other of Frasier and Two and a Half Men, in which the latter has the trappings of sophistication but the same general plot and joke structure. One of them actually is aiming at something more.
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