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I try not to make predictions, as they’re inevitably wrong. The last three predictions I made were that “The Aviator” would beat “Million Dollar Baby” for Best Picture, that John Kerry would beat George W. Bush for the presidency, and that UCLA would beat Florida for the national championship.

It seems the only predictions I can correctly make are those that are so obvious they blur the line between prophecy and common sense, like picking USC over UCLA in football for the last two years. It is in this frame of reference that I predict “The Da Vinci Code,” which will be released in theaters on Friday, will be an enormous success.

But the details aren’t as obvious as they seem. The vast majority of talk you hear about the film relates exclusively to its religious implications as a sort of anti-“The Passion of the Christ” attempting to undermine Christian theology.

Pastors either want their congregations to boycott the film or see it so they can denounce it. One California pastor has given members of his congregation Starbucks gift cards and free movie tickets so they can take people to see the film and then buy them coffee and explain what’s wrong with everything they just saw. While amusing, this will not affect the success of the film. Instead, “The Da Vinci Code” will make more money than any other movie this summer because it embodies what writer John Seabrook of The New Yorker calls “nobrow” culture – meaning neither highbrow nor lowbrow.

Anyone who has read “The Da Vinci Code” can see that the book is sophisticated enough in its sense of art history to attract readers who only read literary novels while simultaneously entertaining enough to attract readers who want to be entertained. The book – and by proxy, the movie – reflects the blending of highbrow and lowbrow culture in exactly the postmodern way Seabrook describes in “Nobrow,” his book on the subject.

Seabrook argues that the division between “highbrow,” or elite, culture and “lowbrow,” or mass-produced, culture has collapsed, leaving the world only with a composite nobrow culture in its stead. The film version of “The Da Vinci Code” is attracting media attention for its religious implications – highbrow – and its teaming-up of Ron Howard and Tom Hanks, the creative team that brought us “Splash” and “Apollo 13” – lowbrow. Only in a nobrow culture could that sentence exist and make sense.

Though I doubt he realized it at the time, Dan Brown created the perfect example of nobrow culture when he wrote “The Da Vinci Code,” and the book’s ensuing popularity comes as no surprise to me. Modern popular culture can’t escape its hybrid perspective, which explains why I could compare the Oscars, a presidential election and an NCAA sporting event in the first paragraph of this column.

“The Da Vinci Code” essentially merges high and low culture to create a product with enough accessible reference points to interest anyone with a pulse, without prioritizing any of them or isolating potential consumers.

The success of “The Da Vinci Code” will come as a result of such a dichotomy. Subjective taste doesn’t matter with this film because it includes everything. In a Los Angeles Times story about the film, Gary Poole, a Chicago-based pastor, said that “it’s probably going to be an awesome movie,” referring to its entertainment value while ignoring its religious perspective. Distinctions like that only reinforce the film’s status on top of the nobrow Everest.

In a New York Times story about the film, director Howard compares the experience of filming in the Louvre to filming underwater for “Splash” or in a weightless atmosphere for “Apollo 13,” ultimately deciding that he and Hanks “appreciate this as much as those experiences.”

In other words, working with the most famous painting in the world is the approximate cultural equivalent to taking a swim or a particularly exciting flight in an airplane. Without a brow to raise or lower, the cultural stratosphere is equal and balanced.