Film Studies: Time for gross, vulgar nonsense

Do not expect too much of the Oscars tonight, for somehow the picture business has not risen to the allegedly humbling occasion it faces. I refer to the first Academy Awards of the new era, the one in which "everything is changed". If only. Yes, the awards ceremony has a new home, the Kodak Theatre, but there are already bitter complaints about it – for it has too few seats to accommodate all the members of the Academy.

There is also set to be an "event", an inspirational interlude, whatever you want to call it. For Laura Ziskin, who is producing tonight's ceremony, has engaged Errol Morris to make a short film intended to reaffirm the vitality of the movie, our faith in our entertainment, and the readiness of Hollywood to face up to its responsibilities. A lot of people not of the movie kingdom have been asked to volunteer their favourite movie, their first movie experience and to complete the sentence, "A movie is...". All those sound-bites, with flashes of movie, no doubt, will be assembled to assert that, yes, Hollywood is still here, still the pumping heart of America, still ... trying to get away with the old nonsense.

No one in this film-let is likely to be allowed to wonder why it was that the scenes from 11 September somehow resembled action movies we had had to suffer in the previous decade. No one will reflect on how a piece of idiocy like Pearl Harbor, and a mindless exultation in combat, Black Hawk Down, came out just before and just after 11 September. No one is going to be allowed to say that the strictly American offerings for this Oscar night represent a threadbare culture and a demoralised picture business.

So let's admit that Mulholland Drive was the one great American film of last year (it has a nomination for David Lynch as Best Director). A Beautiful Mind, which I anticipate will win Best Picture (and a lot besides that) is neither beautiful nor anything to do with the mind – indeed, Ron Howard's film is a glum admission that the mind is a citadel our movies cannot penetrate. The nominee that ought to win Best Picture – the first part of The Lord of the Rings – because it is an authentic spectacle and exactly what movies can do well, will likely be edged out because it is so solidly New Zealand in its vision. Not enough Hollywood people know Tolkien well enough to appreciate this brave enterprise.

The wave carrying 'A Beautiful Mind' will probably bring Russell Crowe his second Oscar in a row. If so, I hope he has time enough to read all the poetry he knows. Sadly, he needs only a few seconds to reveal his lack of grace, and Hollywood is getting a little tired of that. So it's possible that, in advance, the voters will have thought that out and gone with Denzel Washington in Training Day or Sean Penn in I Am Sam. But I doubt it.

It is in the matter of Best Actress that Hollywood could do itself some good. The competition is severe: Judi Dench in Iris; Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge (with The Others to remember); Sissy Spacek in In the Bedroom; Renee Zellweger in Bridget Jones's Diary. Grant the difficulty in picking one of those, then I can see no decent alternative to giving the Oscar to Halle Berry for Monster's Ball. That is a modest film, with many faults, but Berry's performance is stunning. It is probably the best performance of the five – and far bolder, far less expected, than Sissy Spacek's fine job.

But we all of us need to have Berry win so that, at last, the Best Actress Oscar will have gone to a black performer. In which case, there is the chance that Ms Berry could rise to the occasion and give a great speech, one that recounts the history of prejudice, hypocrisy and lies in Hollywood's employment of blacks, one that reads off the names of black actresses. It could have its own visual accompaniment – a montage of the housemaids, the whores, the crazies, the mamas, the simpletons they played. It might end on the sardonic face of Lena Horne or Billie Holiday. Something could be accomplished beyond mere self-congratulation.

Yes, of course Sissy Spacek or Kidman could win. And they "deserve" it inasmuch as they made a good picture and did well in it. But the system (that ramshackle, shameful thing) and the great "we" (the public, the world) deserve Berry's victory more. After all, the Oscars is a gross, vulgar nonsense, increasingly remote from the possible art of film or even the hope for good entertainment. To give Halle Berry the Oscar would be to admit a vestige of reality.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk

The 74th Annual Academy Awards is live on BBC2 from 12.45am tonight