Oscar Night conjures up very mixed feelings for me. On the one hand, you have one of the few points during the year when the film industry still retains a little glamour and dignity, and the creative disagreements and personality issues which dog the stars for the rest of the year are put aside. On the other, it’s the Hollywood machine justifying its own existence by acclaiming its own pictures, directors and performers definitively The Best, claiming all English-language cinema worldwide as its own to judge and reserving one award for the non-English-speaking world. My feelings on the subject can vary widely from year to year, too, depending on how many deserving British artists are passed over in favour of Hollywood time-servers and whether the Academy vote like sheep for the biggest film which happens to be around at the time.

This year I’m reasonably content. By honouring Return of the King so comprehensively, Peter Jackson’s vision, commitment and contribution to cinema have been suitably rewarded. A genuinely popular, accessible and enjoyable film has been recognised, and in a genre which one might have thought would deter the normally conservative voters. Normally it’s the human interest dramas which get the nod, the likes of American Beauty or A Beautiful Mind, although these can also be the most likely to date, as the topics over which we agonise today may seem as irrelevant in thirty years’ time as the concerns of the 1970’s are to us today. A surprising number of influential films have missed out over the years- notably Citizen Kane losing out to How Green Was My Valley in 1941- and it’s almost axiomatic that the iconic films which define cinema for many people are rarely honoured except for the technical awards. The films which win Oscars are only occasionally the ones which put bums on seats, while there’s a large and loyal public going to see genre films which the Academy disdains.

There’s also the issue of viewing the Oscars from a British perspective. Two main factors occur to me here- firstly, there’s the fact that you can usually bank on a few awards being handed out for films that haven’t been released yet, for all the usual money-related reasons. Apparently British and American audiences have fairly similar tastes, so somebody somewhere realised that they could save on unnecessary distribution costs by releasing films over here after they’ve been out for a few weeks in the States, thus weeding out the straight-to-video chaff at an early stage. There’s also the cachet that it gives a film on its UK release to have little gold figurines printed in the corner of the poster, which is hard to recapture once the film is out. But what also gets to me is that we have our own perfectly good awards in the BAFTAs and yet we still give precedence to the opinion of the Hollywood industry. For once it’d be good for us as a nation to show a little self-belief and confidence in our own discernment. To believe that our taste is, however slightly, different from American tastes and that Hollywood can think what it likes, but the people with experience and judgement in the British film industry think this instead. And perhaps give notice that in the event that the winner can’t be bothered coming to London to collect the award, it’ll be given to the runner-up. In any case, to treat our own awards as being of the same importance as those issued in a foreign country.

But the system throws up nice surprises as well. Jim Broadbent can hardly have thought when he was appearing in Victoria Wood’s sketch shows that one day he’d be a recipient. Every so often one year’s ceremony recognises the well-crafted film and the spellbinding performance. It’s a terribly arbitrary system and presupposes both that you can elect artistic merit and that each year produces films of roughly similar quality, but for all that it produces moments of elegance, dignity and humanity. Everybody remembers different moments- Michael Moore’s intense but misjudged rant, Gwyneth Paltrow and Halle Berry dissolving into tears, Roberto Benigni bemoaning his lack of adequate English to express his gratitude. And that’s what awards ceremonies are for, really- the films take second place to that moment when the stars stand up there as people and realise that, for a year at least, they’re the best.