Heheh, great topic!   This is one of those places where Death of the Author simplifies things considerably for me.  I generally don't put a lot of weight on what an author might have been trying to say; I put much more weight on what was actually said.  At the logical extreme, I take an author's opinion of eir own work just as seriously as anyone else's opinion of eir work.  In practice I don't usually take it quite this far, but this does mean at least that if an author's opinion of eir work is very different from mine, we both have the right to laugh at each other.

Let's open up a whole can of worms by taking The Rocky Horror Picture Show as an example.  I feel pretty confident that the intent of its creators was primarily parodic, certainly self-parodic.  I don't think they were trying very hard to make something that was well-shot, well-acted, or even coherent; on the contrary, they were going for "so bad it's good."  And some Rocky Horror fans enjoy the show in this spirit, in this ironic wink-and-a-nod kind of way.  But a lot of them actually think Rocky Horror is good, and you don't have to squint that hard to understand why.  The film is uninhibited, like its characters.  It's got a soul, it's uncompromised, it embraces itself.  So what if it's poorly paced and makes no sense?  It's awesome.

According to me, people who enjoy Rocky Horror ironically and people who enjoy it unironically are equally "right," regardless of what was in Richard O'Brien's head when he wrote the screenplay.  Or more precisely, "right" is a concept that doesn't apply to how you enjoy media.  The answer to "Not Sure If Serious" is "Serious For Me" or "Not Serious For Me," or sometimes a complex mixture of both of them.  (This last is how I enjoy Star Trek: The Next Generation.)  Now, maybe Richard O'Brien thinks about the screaming fans at midnight screenings and goes "come on, guys, Rocky Horror was a piece of cultural detritus that should have died with the '70s, how can you possibly be taking it seriously in 2012."  But even if this is his reaction, it doesn't invalidate the experience of people who love Rocky Horror unironically.  The joke is not on anyone.  Or the joke is on people who insist that others have to enjoy a work for the same reasons they do.

There was a good, long overdue perhaps moment in an interview with Bruce Willis around the time of the last Die Hard movie where he explicitly called out McClane for being bigoted and, you know, an asshole. Which, of course, he is, but without the actor confirming he knows it, one might be tempted to believe he agrees with him.

Same with Eli Roth and Death Proof, and his statement that if that had been a Knocked Up or whatever, he and the other guys at the beginning of the movie would be the heroic, good, nice guys. They're not. They're jerks who can't get laid unless the women are tricked into it.

You guys know that scene when a drunken Rhett manhandles Scarlett in the movie Gone With the Wind?

Well...that...kind of turns me on. I feel guilty because we can't tell if he raped her or not. On one hand she's struggling but in the next scene she's clearly woken up elated.