Gramsci is the perfect Communist theoretician for the well-off artsy urban Westerner.
Despite his fans, he was really a very brilliant guy - he was to Western culture what Stalin was to kulaks: a malevolent genius.
He is perfect for Lit Crit, I would imagine, for two reasons: (1) so much of his writing deals with cultural politics rather than dry economics and (2) most of his writing is in code, since the bulk of his most significant work was written from a Fascist prison cell and he had to dodge the prison censor, and that code provides semiologists much fun with polysemy.
Out of all the leftist cultural theoreticians I've read, I have to say the most interesting have been Gramsci and Blanchot.
Gramsci remains popular among what would be called the "extreme right" in Europe - folks like Alain de Benoist, Koenradd Logghe, etc. These people consider themselves to be an "anti-bourgeois" right.
And de Benoist and Gramsci are also popular touchpoints with the group of writers associated with Chronicles magazine: Paul Gottfried, Thomas Fleming, Lew Rockwell.
It gets tiring to hear Gramsci cited whenever a movie/book/cultural artifact displays some sort of leftist point of view. It’s probably because the creators were leftists...not because they are ‘Dedicated Gramscians’. Michael Moore probably doesn’t have a clue who Gramsci is.