Alonso Duralde, writing for Salon, ran a piece the other day asking why so many films for Latinos are bad. The heart of his piece: Spanish-speaking countries have given cinema bankable, artsy, serious actors like Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz, Gael Garcia Bernal, Salma Hayek … so, Duralde ponders, ” …why is Hollywood returning the favor by making such dreadful movies for Latino audiences?”

It’s an interesting enough question, but try reversing Duralde’s premise: Is Hollywood is making terrific movies for everyone but Latinos? Maybe in some parallel universe, but certainly not in this one. Blacks, Whites, Latinos, Asians, Gays, Women, hell, even kiddie flicks and teen schlock — the problem is not that Hollywood makes shitty movies for Latinos, it’s that Hollywood, with very few exceptions, makes shitty movies for everyone. Unfortunately, people keep paying to see them, and as long as that’s the case, Hollywood will keep on churning them out.

Duralde goes on to enumerate a laundry list of Latino stereotypes that tend to permeate Latino-targeted fare: “close-minded and tradition-bound fathers, dialogue about how we people from [insert specific Spanish-speaking country here] like to talk loud and get in each other’s business, a boisterous dancing-in-a-nightclub scene, and at least one rebellious child who wants to either go to college, marry outside of la raza, or come out of the closet.”

Okay, fair enough. But it’s also true that movies targeted at other specific groups aim equally for the stereotypical sweet spots. How many Black films (including the Tyler Perry films) can you think of that do not involve at least two or three of the following: loud, boisterous family gatherings; loud, boisterous gatherings of a group of women, all talking over each other; bossy, finger-wagging, nagging wives/girlfriends; soul food; domineering matriarchal family structures, usually involving a bossy grandma or mother threatening physical violence for various transgressions; a family member with a white boyfriend/girlfriend who is portrayed as the dorkiest, most stereotypically wonder bread person on the planet.

Or how about Asian films? I honestly can’t think of a lot of Asian-targeted mainstream films that don’t involve martial arts in some way — can you? And even among indie films, Asian-American films in particular are rife with stereotypes: The controlling, never-satisfied Tiger Mother (restrain me, seriously) and the teenager — usually a girl — who’s rebelling against that control;the teenager who takes piano or violin; the college student who wants to be an artist of some sort, who’s majoring in engineering or pre-med to satisfy parental expectations.

There are interesting Asian films that don’t pander as much to the typical Americanized view of what it means to be Asian — Secret Sunshine and I Saw the Devil, among more recent Asian entries, come to mind. As for Asian-American indies? Off the top of my head: Eric Byler’s Americanese, Wayne Wang’s Princess of Nebraska and A Thousand Years of Good Prayers (he also brought us The Joy Luck Club, but we’ll let that slide), the underseen and under-appreciated Eve and the Firehorse … help me out here, people. There have to be more, right?

White folks, I guess, generally defy stereotyping until you break us down by religion or class or geographical region: the snooty white rich kid, the white middle class family who thinks they’re enlightened until said enlightenment is challenged by a son or daughter coming out as gay/dating a person of another race or religion, the lower-class white family played with varying degrees of stereotypical detail depending on whether said family lives in Boston or somewhere in the South. When it comes to the latter, by the way, I have to add that mainstream movies only very rarely actually get the tone and details of the South right without steeping those details in a soup of overused Southern expressions and attitudes.

So the question really isn’t why Latino films are so bad, or even why Latino films are permeated with stereotypes; it’s really two completely different questions: 1) Why do audiences pay to see bad movies, period? and 2) What is it about stereotypes of all stripes that connect with audiences enough to keep them coming back for more, and more, and more?

The former leads to a deeper question of what purpose movies serve within our greater culture: to entertain or to inform? Is it primary role of movies to address compelling social issues like wars in the Middle East or Africa, drug wars and cultural wars here at home, political issues like gay rights, abortion rights, racial, class and gender inequalities? Or is there more a place for the mindless movie that seeks to serve no deeper social cause than to entertain the masses, distract them from whatever bad news permeates the day? Rightly or wrongly, there’s certainly more audience for the latter.

A quote near the end of Duralde’s piece from the CEO of Pantelion films, a new venture targeting films at Latino audiences, perhaps sums it up best when he talks about what they’ve learned from surveys of Latino audiences: “… they don’t want to be hit over the head with the Latino issues of the day — border wars and things that are happening with drugs and violence, or problems with gangs. They’re going to Hollywood movies. They want to be entertained.”

I’d take that a step further and suggest the obvious: this is true, for the most part, not just for Latino audiences, but for audiences across racial and cultural boundaries. I met a woman the other day who told me, with a complete lack of irony, that her favorite films are Transformers and Gone in 60 Seconds, which was kind of an eye-opener for me, because in my world people who love — really love — those types of movies are a myth on the level of the Loch Ness Monster.

The market for films that address deeper political and social issues is small and maybe even finite, and even smaller if you’re talking documentaries. Arthouse films that challenge the mainstream, that seek to entertain while speaking to greater issues, are great — for me, and maybe for you. But maybe, after all, not for an awful lot of people.

For most of America, there’s clearly not a huge interest in films that seek to inform, or even to entertain in intelligent ways. If there were, folks, all the good films we just saw at Sundance — and there were a lot of them this year — would have no trouble finding a distributor and an audience, while the latest special-effects extravaganza would flounder so desperately for box office bang that no such sequels would ever be greenlit.

That’s not the world we live in, though, and it goes way, way beyond Latino films. I suspect Duralde knows this, because the thesis of his piece quickly broadens to acknowledge that. We live in a world where, after Avatar and Toy Story 3, the top domestic grossers for 2010 included Alice in Wonderland, Iron Man 2, and Twilight: Eclipse, all films that skew heavily to the “pure entertainment” side of the art vs. entertainment scale.

To be fair, the top grossers list also includes some films that don’t resort to stereotype to connect with their audiences, and even some that I’d argue manage to successfully hit that elusive sweet spot where art and big box office connect. I’d put both Avatar and Toy Story 3 on that list, along with Inception, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pt. 1, and Shutter Island — though it’s true also that none of those films are exactly rife with minority characters, or openly gay characters (a couple of decently strong chicks, but that’s about it).

Bottom line: In the world of Hollywood studios, the watermark for “success” is measured more in box office dollars than any sense of striving for art. And all the pseudo-smart think pieces in the world on how this or that sub-set of mainstream culture is under-served or portrayed stereotypically isn’t going to change that so long as that’s what most people want to see.

Even when arthouse films are shown in mainstream theaters side-by-side with the latest Hollywood dreck, which films do you think people are choosing to plunk down their hard-earned cash to see? Time and time again, American audiences prove that even if you build it, make it available at mainstream theaters, and offer it up on a silver platter with a box of popcorn and a tub of soda, they will still choose the mindless action flick with big explosions, a ridiculous plot line, underdeveloped character motivation and, yes, stereotypical minority characters more than the smart, artsy, issue-driven film, over and over and over again.

Until that changes (and don’t hold your breath), Hollywood will keep feeding that hungry machine with exactly the kind of crap that people — Latino or otherwise — are willing to pay for.

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