The Oscars are the end of history. One night in February, questions about how a year’s pack of films will be thought of decades later are answered; the narratives attached to individual movies — the plucky indie outsider, the high-minded drama — are set in stone. Who remembers, now, that in 1974 the film that captured the essence of what it meant to feel white, working class and excluded — Rocky — was a small-budget no-hoper up against Taxi Driver, Network and All the President’s Men before the Academy perplexingly fell in love with it? We now think of Sylvester Stallone’s franchise as an epoch-defining, all-carrying juggernaut that helped spark the Reagan Revolution, but it wasn’t till the Oscar nod that that story won out against the plucky underdog one.

Thus, for us, these Oscars matter. When movies are set in what to Academy voters are foreign countries, the links between the movie’s content, the way it wins or doesn’t, and how people are thinking about that country are strong. Consider Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: its Oscar successes were because of, and then strengthened, the idea of a timeless China where propriety is more important than gain, but which is coming to get you nonetheless. Il Postino and Life is Beautiful show Italy haunted by and obsessed with its past, by the use of language to hide the past’s scars. City of God means that the first image of Brazil is of teeming favelas, of guns and desperation.

And were I French, the implications of Amelie and Chocolat’s success would be deeply irritating.

... contd.