Indeed, there are some controversies that seem by now almost as old as the Oscars themselves. Every spring, critics and audiences demand: Why wasn't that small movie we all loved (this year's fill-in-the-blank is The Straight Story) nominated for Best Picture? How could the academy ignore Albert Brooks yet again? And why was Meryl Streep nominated for still another film nobody saw?

These would be valid questions if the awards given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences were actually meant to identify the best that Hollywood has to offer. But, of course, that's not what the Oscars are for. As Frank Capra once put it, the Academy Awards are the greatest public-relations scheme ever invented. The publicity, the hype and the grand, gaudy ceremony are not intended to set a standard for the achievements of Hollywood. Quite to the contrary, they typically show an absolute ignorance of — and, with increasing monotony in recent years, a downright hostility to — the entire notion of standards. The Oscars thrive because Hollywood is an industry with an inferiority complex: The people who make movies are just not quite sure enough for comfort that they're really artists (for one thing, they make too much money), and so they give one another little statues every year, just to reassure themselves.

The Academy Awards were established in the late 1920s, as Hollywood was under siege by sex scandals, calls for censorship, the onset of the Great Depression and the expensive and uncertain changeover from silent films to sound. Some good, high-toned publicity would be a godsend, and an annual ceremony honoring the best that Hollywood had to offer would call attention to the many good films for which the industry could justly claim credit.

The ceremony itself was rather small and private for the first decade or so, but the honors were widely publicized and turned out to be effective in drawing attention to Hollywood's ability to produce solid entertainment with some decent ideas and a minimum of culturally poisonous nonsense. The awards often engendered disputes over whether particular winners were actually the best, and the studios worked hard to obtain honors for their most prestigious (and, usually, expensive) films. But in general it was clear that the academy was at least trying to acknowledge the best movies and individual achievements of the previous year.

For the past two decades, however, there simply hasn't been any real threat to Hollywood's survival, as home video and international growth have added gargantuan new markets for the film industry's output. It doesn't really matter whether Hollywood films are great, because the studios, producers, performers, best boys and agents are going to make money anyway. And since Hollywood is, in point of fact, the best place to make movies today, the most talented directors and actors from around the globe all come to town. Hollywood has vanquished its competitors and has little need to sing its own praises.

This may be why the academy seldom pretends anymore that the Oscars honor the "best." Its official records refer to Best Picture, Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role, and so on, but the publicity materials and official website simply refer to categories such as Actor in a Leading Role. Even the official rules the academy sends to voters — "72nd Annual Academy Awards® Rules for Distinguished Achievements During 1999" — refrain from using the B-word except for Best Picture, referring instead to awards for performance by an actor, achievement in cinematography, and the like. The honors are listed as "Awards of Merit for Achievements during 1999," and at the ceremony itself, presenters of awards are instructed to use phrases such as "Outstanding Achievement" rather than "Best."

It was in the 1970s that the academy began to look for ways to hand out the awards without implying that the individual achievements so honored are actually superior to those that aren't. Of course, it makes sense not to pretend that the academy members — or anybody else — always get it right. Cary Grant, for example, never won an Academy Award (except an honorary one, toward the end of his life). The same is true of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Ernst Lubitsch, Fred Astaire, Kirk Douglas, Irene Dunne and many other highly respected film talents. And the studios certainly tried at times to influence votes, though never at a level to undermine the awards' credibility.

Nonetheless, until the early 1980s, the choices were usually plausible, and the Oscar-winning films from earlier years remain quite watchable today. A winning movie had to have a clear and appropriate structure, the performances were expected to express the characters' motivations and emotional condition, and the direction was supposed to point out clearly the matters for which the viewers should watch. There was often debate over which films and individual achievements best exemplified these ideals. But the standards themselves were clear — and that is no longer true, as the academy's skittishness about using the word "Best" makes clear.

Having dropped the fig leaf of objectivity, the academy has publicity left as the only rationale for the awards, thereby exposing the process to the whims of fashion and increasingly blatant manipulation by the studios, often at the insistence of the talent agencies.

This vulnerability is exacerbated by the academy's idiosyncratic process for choosing the recipients. Oscar winners customarily talk about "being honored by one's peers," but that is only partially true. The various branches of the academy do indeed choose the nominees in their appropriate categories (except for a few, such as Best Picture, for which all academy members may choose nominees). But after the nominations are done, all members get to vote for the final awards (again except for a few nobody cares about, such as Best Documentary, for which only those who attend special screenings may vote). Everybody from Steven Spielberg to the guys who do public-relations are the "peers" who select the winners.

Knowing this, studios and producers indulge in cajoling arm-twisting, and advertising at a level that would have been considered horrifying in the 1930s. Huge "For Your Consideration" advertisements for such hopeless fare as Daylight, The Rock and The Bone Collector swell the trade publications and inspire widespread derision. The lack of standards for the awards makes the competition increasingly furious and ridiculous.

Back in 1971, George C. Scott refused to accept the Oscar for his performance in Patton, deriding the award as a popularity contest and the ceremony as a "meat market." The situation is worse now. To an outside observer, such craft awards as editing and costume design can be particularly bewildering. It is widely believed that the various specialists in these areas largely control their own awards and pass them around on the basis of who's due next.

But the more prominent awards aren't so much corrupt as irrational. The voters seem to use the Best Acting awards to show that appearing in Hollywood films is the preeminent goal for every actor and that Hollywood is a very kind-hearted and welcoming place. Thus, being from some other country is the highest qualification; in the past 10 years the winners have included three Englishmen, one Australian, and an Italian. Next, playing a character with a physical or mental incapacity is a plus, as is homosexuality, transvestism, alcoholism, various forms of insanity and flamboyant wickedness. The characters portrayed by the last 10 Best Actor winners have been a quadriplegic poet and painter, a doctor accused of attempted murder, a serial killer, a blind man, a homosexual dying of AIDS, a simpleton, an alcoholic, a mentally ill pianist, an obsessive-compulsive and a kooky concentration camp inmate.

For women, being English gets a nomination, but usually not the big prize. Here, faking an accent is a plus, and making oneself ugly helps, but the big money is in struggling to do a job with a lot of big, dumb men getting in your way. Thus the 1990s Best Actress winners have portrayed a woman pretending to be a man so that she could play a woman on-stage, a waitress taking care of a sick son and troubled by other needy males, and a North Dakota policewoman tracking some blundering male criminals. Also: an FBI agent working with a serial killer to catch another serial killer (both male), a nun crusading for a murderer (male), a couple of mentally unbalanced characters, a crusading Englishwoman and a mute piano teacher abused by a man. Here one clearly sees an ideology forming.

Being old and never having won an Oscar is a good qualification in the Supporting Actor and Actress categories. James Coburn, for example, won last year, and Jack Palance, Martin Landau, Judi Dench and Brenda Fricker have all won in recent years. Being very new is also good, as Anna Paquin and Cuba Gooding Jr. can attest. With the oldsters, the message is "Sorry we missed you back when you were actually good," and for the youngsters, it's "Hollywood is a very warm-hearted, welcoming place, not the cutthroat battle you've found it so far."

The screenplay nominations, by contrast, have a strong bias toward what Hollywood calls creativity. Gods and Monsters, Sling Blade, Fargo, The Usual Suspects, Pulp Fiction and the like cement Hollywood's reputation as a hotbed of new ideas, consistently lavishing attention on a variety of doomed weirdoes. Having two screenplay categories (original and adapted) also enables the academy to honor newcomers such as Callie Khouri and Christopher McQuarrie while consigning them to obscurity unless, like Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, and Billy Bob Thornton, they can act. The Best Director award, by contrast, nearly always goes to the Best Picture winner, to remind us that movies are a director's medium, meaning that they are much better than television.

Which brings us to the biggie. Some observers have complained about a political bias in the Best Picture selections of the past decade and a half, but if there is one, it must be very general indeed. The winning films since 1983—Terms of Endearment, Amadeus, Out of Africa, Platoon, The Last Emperor, Rain Man, Driving Miss Daisy, Dances with Wolves, Silence of the Lambs, Unforgiven, Schindler's List, Forrest Gump, Braveheart, The English Patient, Titanic and Shakespeare in Love—vary widely in quality, location, time period, political implication, style, action, characters, romance, special effects, etc. Most, but not all, are set in past times, and most, but not all, take a long time to watch. Some are uplifting, some have happy endings, some have important romantic elements, and some portray grand and heroic characters. But others do not.

What they all share, however, is an intense and consistent earnestness. The movies that win the Best Picture Oscar are all passionately serious — overtly, pressingly sincere. They all attempt Big Subjects: the Holocaust, Vietnam, the settling of the American West, class divisions, the role of the artist, the nature of evil. Of course, most of them fail in their attempt at Big Subjects, with characters that make little sense and cinematography often inappropriately glamorous and distracting. But they all clearly strive to be taken seriously.

This year's nominees — The Sixth Sense, The Green Mile, American Beauty, The Insider and The Cider House Rules — all share this now-mandatory surface sobriety and sense of great import. But only one of them, The Sixth Sense, has a reasonably logical story line, believable characters and appropriate direction. The rest just have Importance.

What this reveals is that the most economically and culturally powerful entertainment industry in the world lacks the self-confidence even to nominate superior but less earnest films such as Three Kings, The Matrix and Toy Story 2. In short, the academy's choices for Best Picture — and the other major awards — beg for respect.

This, then, is what the Academy Awards are all about today. Behind all the bluster, the glamour, the passion and the backstage intrigue is the real purpose of today's Oscars: to soothe Hollywood's immense artistic inferiority complex. So the academy soldiers on, no longer confident in either its traditional standards or its current importance but doing very well nonetheless: money, power and inferiority all in one big, gaudy package.