The road to this realization has been difficult and humbling, and is hardly complete. It’s depressing to realize that a proudly middle-aged progressive is not immune to garden-variety, middle-aged malaise.

Nevertheless, as school ends and summer begins, nostalgia hits me hardest. I can’t help but reminisce about how for me summertime always meant gorging myself on two, maybe three movies per week.

The moment my friends and I were paid for mowing a lawn or washing a car, we’d hike a mile under and aggressive sun to the independent movie theater next to the duck pin bowling alley in the shopping plaza in our little town of Hamden, Connecticut. When everything went multiplex, this small theater simply cut the room in half lengthwise without adjusting the seats, so we were now aimed at the right or left corner, depending on which theater we were in.

But still, it was dark, cold as hell, and magical.

We saw pretty much everything that came out all summer long. Then by late August, we’d started jonesing for TV Guide’s “Fall Preview,” as thick as a paperback. We’d study and debate the then three network’s offerings as seriously as any network execs.

I’m realizing that what we craved back then in the 70s was interaction. On some level we understood that culture came to us piped in on a few channels at home and a few films every week. We yammered at each other and even talked back at the screen because we were powerless to comment in other ways.

My thirteen-year-old daughter, despite her taste for British boy bands and forgettable rom-coms, is a much more active participant in the culture she consumes. I may complain about her disappearing into her room to watch a half-dozen episodes of Monk on her netbook, then Skyping her BFFN (Best Friend For Now), whom she saw all day at school, but she takes agency for what goes before her eyes in ways that when I was her age, I could only envy.

When I was a kid, wrestling for the remote was the closest I ever got to controlling media. Today, the device my daughter holds in her hand can control not just the TV but her entire known world. She take a picture with her phone, and with Instagram or Camera + she can edit, frame, caption and send it. She can record herself singing Maroon 5 and then autotune it. I can’t call her a couch potato if while watching Design Star she’s designing a new couch on an app on her phone.

Yes, the major studios dump badly recycled garbage on us every summer (everyone involved in Adam Sandler’s recent That’s My Boy should be tried in The Hague). The difference now, though, is that this level of crappy disposable cultural production is where it deserves to have landed all along – where my daughter and I can take it or leave it. Buy the headphones on the plane or not. Watch the middle third months later on cable while we’re folding clothes or not. The choice is now wholly ours.

My daughter can personally regulate the culture she consumes from the electronic rock in her hand — she can join the cultural conversation herself at a level frighteningly close to that of the professionals.

I’ve been writing films for years, and in the seven years since I started teaching filmmaking, I’ve seen the cost of indie film production reduce precipitously. Seven years ago it was common to see a student spend $30,000 on a twenty-minute film and not uncommon for them to spend $60,000. Today my teenager cuts a video for a school project on iMovie as casually as she texts her friends. I tell her how Lena Dunham began with YouTube shorts in college that blossomed into her micro-budget features, Dealing and Tiny Furniture, before her explosion onto HBO with Girls.

My daughter just nods. She’s not amazed. For her, that revolution has already been won. Why should she waste her time feeling nostalgic for success on the big screen when she’s got a brave new universe in the palm of her hand?

Let the record show that I’m a huge Tom Cruise fan. I love the guy. I became aware of him as an actor, as opposed to just a guy in the movies, when I went to see Interview with a Vampire. Anne Rice had been outspoken in her disappointment at the casting of Cruise as Lestat — and he wound up being the only thing in the movie worth watching. He killed in that flick. He kills in every flick. “Jerry Maguire,” “Eyes Wide Shut,” “Tropic Thunder,” “Magnolia,” “Collateral” — stand-out performances, all. Is he limited? Sure, but who isn’t? I may not like every movie he does (“Mission Impossible” is wretched, and “Vanilla Sky” is a train wreck), but I always like him. The guy is a movie star, plain and simple, and he’s been one for a staggeringly long period of time.

His personal life, however, is harder to get behind. It’s not so much what we know as what we don’t — or, rather, what we think we know. Yes, he’s a Scientologist … but what does that mean, exactly? Does he really believe all that stuff, or is Scientology just another high-profile acting job?

And then there’s the elephant in the room. The big, pink elephant.

The rumors have dogged him for decades now, since before he rocked out to Bob Seger in tighty-whities. That he wants to do it to for Johnny. That Mimi and Nicole and Katie were beautiful beards. That what he really desires is A Few Good Men.

If there is fire to be found in this great cloud of gay smoke, it would be remarkable. The guy’s been A-list famous since 1983, and there has been no public evidence at all, none, to support the rumors. Masseurs have not pressed charges against him; photographs of him kissing other men on the lips on a tarmac have not popped up on the Internet, unlike other movie-star Scientologists we can name. In this day and age, when so many celebrities rise and fall by virtue of a stray tweet, when everyone in greater Los Angeles has a camera phone and thus the capability to catch him in flagrante delicto, it’s almost inconceivable that he could be acting on these alleged homoerotic impulses. Either he’s straight, or he gives new meaning to the term Cruise control.

But if the rumors are true … if he does prefer the company of men … if his impossible mission is to be an openly gay action-movie star, his course of action now is clear: Tom Cruise needs to take a page from the Anderson Cooper playbook. He needs to come out, he needs to come out big-time, and when he gets hitched again, he should marry a guy.

It’s not like this sort of disclosure is unprecedented. Cary Grant confessed to bisexuality when he was an old man; so did Richard Burton. Why not Tom Cruise?

Yes, this would be incredibly brave — the sort of courage we come to expect from a man who so convincingly played Maverick and Ethan Hunt. It would also be admirable to the Nth degree. One press release would transform him from thrice-divorced Scientologist weirdo to civil rights hero and gay icon. He could live his life out in the open, and in so doing, make the world a better, more tolerant place. And instead of jumping on Oprah’s couch, he could jump on Ellen’s.

That’s if he’s gay. (Note to the attorneys for Mr. Cruise: I am merely repeating oft-repeated rumors, and this should not be read as an endorsement of them). If he’s not — if the real Tom Cruise is exactly what he’s shown us — then take note, Mila Kunis and Eliza Dushku and Amber Heard and every other hot Hollywood 20-something on the make: Mrs. Tom Cruise is a plum part, and auditions will be held soon.

Although the judges for the NBAs change every year, the sense that the fiction jury is locked in a frustrating impasse with the press and the public is eternal. (One notable recent exception: the selection of Colum McCann’s “Let the Great World Spin” as the winner two years ago.) The press, assuming that the amount of media coverage a novel gets is a reliable indicator of its merit, expresses bafflement. The judges, if they respond at all, defend their choices as simply the best books submitted.

Neither view is entirely persuasive. While it’s certainly true that celebrated novels are not necessarily good, it’s also true that they aren’t necessarily bad, either. Whatever policy each panel of judges embraces, over the years, the impression has arisen that already-successful titles are automatically sidelined in favor of books that the judges feel deserve an extra boost of attention. The NBA for fiction often comes across as a Hail Mary pass on behalf of “writer’s writers,” authors respected within a small community of literary devotees but largely unknown outside.

It’s understandable that the judges (all fiction writers themselves) want to correct this neglect, and that the press interprets this as a rebuke to its own judgment. However, the larger reading public has also proven recalcitrant. If you categorically rule out books that a lot of people like, you shouldn’t be surprised when a lot of people don’t like the books you end up with. This is especially common when the nominated books exhibit qualities — a poetic prose style, elliptical or fragmented storytelling — that either don’t matter much to nonprofessional readers, or even put them off.

If outsiders fail to sympathize with the judges’ perspective, the judges often have a distorted sense of the role literature plays in the lives of ordinary readers. People who can find time for only two or three new novels per year (if that) want to make sure that they’re reading something significant. Chances are they barely notice media coverage of books — certainly not enough to see some titles as “overexposed” — and instead rely on personal recommendations, bookstore browsing and Amazon rankings.

Prizes are one part of this mix, if an influential one, and the public mostly wants the major awards to help them sort out the most important books of the year, not to point them toward overlooked gems with a specialized appeal. In a culture dominated by film and television, all literary novels are so obscure as to be virtually invisible, and books that seem ubiquitous to people embedded in the publishing world are anything but to those who aren’t. (The next time you’re waiting for a bus, ask the person next to you if he or she has heard of Jeffrey Eugenides or “The Art of Fielding.” Hell, ask them if they’ve heard of Jonathan Franzen.)

For these reasons, the National Book Award in fiction, more than any other American literary prize, illustrates the ever-broadening cultural gap between the literary community and the reading public. The former believes that everyone reads as much as they do and that they still have the authority to shape readers’ tastes, while the latter increasingly suspects that it’s being served the literary equivalent of spinach. Like the Newbery Medal for children’s literature, awarded by librarians, the NBA has come to indicate a book that somebody else thinks you ought to read, whether you like it or not.

As a kid, after several such medicinal reading experiences (“… And Now Miguel” by Joseph Krumgold was a particular chore to get through), I took to avoiding books with that gold Newbery badge stamped on their covers. If it weren’t for a desperate lack of alternatives one afternoon, I’d never have resorted to E. L. Konigsburg’s “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler,” which became one of my favorites. Today’s adult readers, with millions of titles a mere click away, are unlikely to find themselves in such straits.

I don’t doubt there have been similarly wonderful books scattered throughout the NBA’s famously esoteric short lists over the years. (I can also attest that there’s been more than one pretentious turkey.) Whether the NBA will hold onto its fading ability to get anyone to read them is another matter.