First Time Watching Casablanca (1943)

Appreciate you providing your experience, and it reinforces exactly what I have feared:  the younger generation, even those in film studies, seem to show very little interest in Classic Hollywood.  Although, in your example, equal blame should also go towards the professor and the film department at the University.  Any film studies major requirements should, at its foundation, teach extensively about the history of cinema.  

But if we take this to its logical extension, the same group of youngsters now who are obsessed with Quentin Tarantino movies, when they're in their 70s, I predict they'll show a similar concern that we are all expressing now, when the youngest generation in 2050 express their lack of film history curiosity, when an 18 year old says..."I don't want to watch some old movie from 1994 called Pulp Fiction...how could I possibly relate to that?"

Wars maybe.  Because that's all covered in their school's American history classes.  How much "studying" of it they do might just be limited to just enough to pass the class.  Not that they all have a driving interest.  And I would surmise their interest in fashion history is all for laughs.  At how silly the clothes and hair-do's their parents and grandparents wore looked.  That was one trick I used to get natural looking smiles from clients as a wedding photographer.  I'd tell the wedding party, when all lined up for an after ceremony alter shot;

"OK, everybody hold still and try to look your best so that twenty or so years from now your children can look at these photos and laugh at your hair-do's!" 

Sepiatone

I watch movies now that I would never have bothered with before I was 40-50 years old. Most young people aren't interested in old stuff.

As we grow older, we grow in appreciation - it may take till we're in our 60's and 70's before we start enjoying the movies of many decades ago, but it does happen eventually.

There's a reason why TCM is more appealing to the over-40's than to the under-40's, generally speaking.

DO NOT dare fast forward through the flashback.  That is one of the most beautifully rendered examples of depicting love found and love lost.  Later in the film, when we see the difficult choices Rick and Ilsa have to make, its has a profound effect on the viewer, largely due to the flashback sequence.