Come this Sunday, much of the world – or at least all of its film critics – will watch with bated breath as a series of small gold men are doled out among film’s best and brightest, in honour of the industry’s 86th annual Academy Awards. But as we mark another occasion of executives and official rigmarole, to what extend should we think of this as merely an arbitrary recognition of the gradual progression of the cinematic mainstream?

Increasingly, it seems that the (in)famous Oscars are little more than a glorified ceremony of self-congratulation for cinema’s most conventional and commanding, rewarding the well-funded efforts of a few well-placed individuals to mass market apparently radical, remarkably conventional re-workings of the American Dream.

The whole nature of the awards, televised since 1953, and now with increasing emphasis placed on the performances and set pieces that intersperse the actual announcements, contribute to an understanding of the event as just that – an event, a celebration. A retrospective of the year in 35mm, if you will, but hardly an occasion to hold up real artistic experimentation, or herald the eventual realisation of cinema’s potential as a tool for cultural reflection and revolution.

Nowadays, some people seem more preoccupied with the colour schemes that are being traipsed down the red carpet than the actual content of what is being applauded, just another off shoot of the Academy Award’s slow metamorphosis into a gargantuan, grotesque marketing campaign.

In the wake of the box office bulldozer that was American Hustle, much attention has been given to the tactics of the one-man conglomerate that is Harvey Weinstein, co-founder of Miramax and co-chairman of the Weinstein Company. He is a man who has, in just over two decades in the industry, racked up something near an astounding 300 nominations, in the process garnering himself a reputation as the definitive, and most dastardly player in the great Oscar game.

Such is Weinstein’s commitment to the campaign, that last year found him recruiting Obama’s former public relations officer and campaign manager to handle Silver Linings Playbook’s part in the contest. He was also once quoted quipping, “What can I say? If you’re Billy the Kid and people around you die of natural causes, everyone thinks you shot them?” – a remarkably jovial response to the allegations of his involvement in a smear campaign against Slumdog Millionaire.

Ethics aside, all of this embodies everything that is exactly unbearable about the Oscars and their symbolism of corporate-funded attempts to steam roll their competitors into submission. That people are discussing terms of games and strategy should surely be evidence enough of the futility of a set of awards that appear to be up for sale, if Weinstein’s budgets are anything to go by.

It’s not just the economic element of the Oscars that render them arbitrary, but the extent to which they sometimes seem preoccupied with the worthiness of what’s in the race. This year particularly, discussion of deservedness abounds. If these were awards based on art alone, should the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio has been nominated three, four, five times without success be of any relevance?

And why is Matthew McConaughey’s weight loss such a source of overawed fascination? Amy Poehler provided the most insightful – if unrelated to this debate – final word on the matter of McConaughey’s shrinking size when she pointed out that this was exactly what every woman ever put in front of a camera had been asked to do.

But it does nonetheless raise an interesting debate about the relevance of an actor’s contribution and commitment to the production and the industry as a whole, to an award that should surely be primarily about performance alone?
This is before you even get caught up in the Academy’s preoccupation with both conservatism, an uneasiness that might well damage the chances of Steve McQueen and company, and self-congratulation, which paid off well last year for Silver Lining’s Playbook and its charming, if hardly ground-breaking portrait of mental health.

All of this is wading dangerously deeper into the murky waters of the merits of awarding art altogether. Obviously recognition is crucial, especially in today’s cut-throat economy, where the prestige that accompanies a prize can make or break a box office run. In the same vein, the value of awards, particularly in cinema, as an otherwise unprecedented showcase through which they can speak to, and be seen by, a much larger audience should never be downplayed, or arguably discouraged. The Oscars, and all of their other institutional counterparts, play a vital role in providing a platform for lesser-known, equally evocative and important cinema.

However, the very categories that many of these offer up remain bland and generic in the face of the sheer variety and scope of today’s cinematic spectrum. How can we ever even pretend to qualify what is best or better? Art, and this article is assuming an interpretation of cinema, or at least, for lack of a better descriptor, good cinema is art, is without the standardised measures that are needed to rank and rate their relative performance.

My frustrations with a series of institutions that insist on the head to head confrontations and comparisons that these measures necessitate – an element of the whole awards season that is underlined again and again by the accompanying commentary, littered throughout with reference to the ‘race’ and its ‘contenders’ – are more apparent than ever before with the diversity of this year’s nominees. Any cinema-goer who has seen both Chiwetel Eijiofor’s painfully dignified performance in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave and DiCaprio’s despotic turn as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, will realise the impossibility of ever finding common ground on which to assess the two. In fact, it would be hard to find a more polarised, but nonetheless equally enrapturing pair – and therein lays the essential problem of awarding art.

Film is powerful, or at least it can be, and while Michael Bay’s ever expanding repertoire might not lend itself to deeper artistic evaluation, film relies on debate and discussion. A good film – an Oscar worthy film, if you will – should provoke argument among its audience. Going to the cinema, much like reading a great novel or wandering through an extraordinary exhibition, should not be a passive experience, existing solely within the confines of its cinematic walls and lasting an average of 120 minutes.

As small, freestanding snap shots of social commentary and cultural portraits, cinema has the potential to open up a conversation with its viewers. Whether it be about the morality of our deeply entrenched capitalist mantras (The Wolf of Wall Street), or the collapse of historic tendencies to mute or romanticise the African American experience (12 Years a Slave), or even the ethics behind the faceless, soulless drugs companies that control our health (Dallas Buyers Club), film should say something and it should encourage its audience to say something back.

The winner-loser dichotomy and competitive, market-driven rhetoric that is fuelled by award season blunts all of this, transforming the cinematic experience into a series of statistics and tick box achievements. Ultimately, it seems to me cinema can achieve a more thorough, more fair recognition through reviews, rather than reduce to the possession of a single, quite small statuette, which may or may not be the product (among other things) of an exceptional spin doctor.

Just as you cannot condense the power of performances or cultural impact of a piece of drama into sculpted metal, neither can you measure merit – and we should stop trying. When Weinstein looks to his unprecedented achievements in facts and figures, he may well feel, and rightly so, that he has won the Academy Awards hoopla, but surely there’s more to cinema than just jumping through hoops?