LGBT people are treated much, much better than they were even ten years ago.
Marijuana is seen as normal, even commonplace in some areas. Whether or not this is good is up to you.
Culturally speaking, we're on the apex of transitioning from postmodernism, which has stayed around for fucking EVER, to New Sincerity/metamodernism, which is a breath of fresh air.
We've done a 180 from the gritty cynicism of the 90s to an unstoppable, perhaps a bit cloying optimism despite the fact that our economic situation in the nineties probably deserved this attitude more.
Rock is pretty much dead as a cultural force and likely will be for a very long time, seeing as how the latest mass revolution in rock (super-smiley commercial-ready fauxlk indie) is pretty much ball-less.
Film is no longer that; ever since Avatar, film has pretty much been 100% digital in the western world, aided by the development of instant streaming services, BluRay, and perhaps most importantly the price revolution in filmmaking. It used to be that getting a film made required you either be independently wealthy (Cassavetes) or be beholden to a mammoth studio. Now, filmmaking is incredibly cheap and finding distribution is no longer the hassle it used to be, even in the supposed glory days of the indie film movement in the nineties. We're seeing the birth of something I'm tentatively calling Gestalt Cinema, best exemplified by The Tree of Life and Upstream Color; while in the past American indie had relied on snappy dialog, much of today's most interesting indie work is actually fairly quiet, relying more on the technical aspects of film to tell the story.
We've also witnessed the rise of the biopic industry when it comes to Oscar season; rather than funding solely original works, the arthouse wings of major studios now are much more likely to fund a formulaic biopic for that year's Oscar contender, as they believe it will garner more awards. This year, half of the Best Picture nominees were biopics; the same holds true for the year before, and will likely continue for some time to come, especially given the chances that a biopic will award the lead a Best Actor or Actress award.
This comes along with the blockbuster explosion as major film studios rely more and more on foreign markets. We're witnessing a quieting of American film in general; the average American major film now has much less dialog than in decades previous, relies much more on epic setpieces, and is nine times out of ten likely to be beholden to an action-oriented subgenre with a built-in audience: comic books, YA novel adaptations, or part of an existing franchise. Drama has disappeared completely from the top grossing films of the year, as has comedy; the last time the nominees for Best Picture included one of the highest grossing films of the year was in 2010, and that was Toy Story 3--an anomaly in and of itself for being an animated feature nominated for Best Picture.
Sorry for going on so much about film, that's my main subject of study and as such I can get carried away.