Has any city been the backdrop (or even the star) of more movies than has Paris? New York, perhaps. London probably is a distant third.

Whether it is because Paris so often ends up on the big screen (Hey, that’s the street in the 7th where my friend used to live!), or because people here have a heightened appreciation of the arts, movie-going here is not the same ol’ drill it is in most of the world.

Take, for instance, the film Moneyball, which we saw at the Gaumont theaters on the Champs Elysees today.

Parisians go to movies to pay attention. This is important. They aren’t there to talk, to text, to make out … they are there to see the movie. This has been my experience over a span of years, and including all sorts of movies: Comedies, thrillers, good movies, bad movies … Whatever it is, Paris audiences are paying rapt attention.

Also, they prefer to see movies in their original format. That is, not dubbed into French. They seem to believe that subtitles are far preferable to jamming another language into someone’s moving lips. Which makes movies an easy proposition for English-speakers in Paris, since most movies here are American movies, and they almost always are labelled “VO” — which stands for version originale.

This is not necessarily the case in the rest of France. I remember seeing an American movie, and a fairly new one, too, in Lyon, which vies with Marseille for the title of “France’s Second City” … and the movie had been dubbed. It was Steve Martin speaking French, which he perhaps can manage, but certainly was not doing when the movie was made.

“Moneyball” is a sort of acid test for Parisian cinephiles.

It is in English, of course. It is about baseball, which the French don’t play. It is about the concept of advanced statistical analysis when applied to baseball, further complicating the movie for the French. And it also is conversationally dense;’ Adam Sorkin did the screen play. No car chases here or buildings blowing up, which don’t need translation.

Yet the people who joined us in the typically small/cramped theater, none of whom I heard speaking English, sat quietly and attentively for the length of the 2-hour, 13-minute movie.

I was watching the French subtitles, and they didn’t even bother trying to translate some baseball phrases. “RBI” I believe came out as “points.”

Too, even for people who grew up in a baseball-playing country, the idea of the importance of on-base percentage and slugging percentage, and OPS … may not be readily understood.

I know that Parisians love movies, but in this case I assumed they battled through “Moneyball” on the strength of about 150 closeups of Brad Pitt, who plays Billy Beane, the Oakland Athletics general manager. Or that they just enjoyed the interplay between characters, the conflicts and resolutions.

Or perhaps they are just polite.

Later in the evening, at a late dinner hosted by a Russian-speaking native who is fluent in both French and English, the Russian posited that what Parisians like about “Moneyball” is the idea of agents of change (in this case, the Brad Pitt character) taking on entrenched people/beliefs/systems, and discovering how that character manages to carry the day. The movie, then, could have been about soccer, or selling washing machines, and Parisians would have watched.

What we have here, then, is a very sophisticated movie-going audience. Unlike almost any other in the world. They had never heard of Billy Beane, and they were not aware that the movie (and the book) don’t give nearly enough credit to Oakland’s starting pitchers (Barry Zito, Tim Hudson, Mark Mulder, Cory Lidle) who were much the best part of that 103-win, 2002 Athletics team. Nor did they feel slightly hoodwinked when, at the end, the director failed to mention that Beane’s A’s have not had a winning season since 2006.

What they liked is movie-making, and movie stars, and “Moneyball” (titled, here: Les Stratege) delivered that. It would be grand if all movie audiences everywhere felt the same, but Paris apparently stands unrivaled — as it does in so many arenas.