By Crispin Sartwell

As I stared glassy-eyed and unblinking at the Academy Awards sunday, it slowly dawned on me: the cinema, always fundamentally a boring and inert art, is now literally dead.

You may think me mad. Box offices are good. Great actors such as Josh Hartnett bestride the globe like pagan colossi. Blockbusters bust blocks, etc.

Nevertheless, I maintain my thesis. Let me take as an example the music categories at the awards, and indeed the whole discreditable business of scoring films and providing songs for them. Year after year, like the coming of spring to the North Pole, John Williams scores all American movies. Frequently, he carts away the Oscar. John Williams writes music of such stupefying banality, music so vastly grandiose yet so utterly trivial, that you cannot possibly listen to it without a giant bag of Twizzlers and a 72-oz Pepsi to distract you. And blockbuster after blockbuster he repeats the same bombastic superficialities, so that everything after the first one was redundant and all movies merge into as single endless nightmare.

The other saps who score Hollywood films are - and this is a deeply disturbing idea - John Williams imitators.

What you get in the song category is invariably of the order of Sting, Paul McCartney, Elton John: meaningless hoohah by chronically white old men.

And the stiffness and stupidity of the music is emblematic of industry as a whole whose values are a sheer nihilism. As we geared up for our Oscar party (don't ask me how I got into this) we watched many pretty people traipsing in on a red carpet, looking uncomfortable as they answered questions from the likes of Leeza Gibbons and Joan Rivers about their absurd clothing. Gibbons and Rivers and Barbara Walters themselves are nice summaries of the whole thing: Lancome-caked Frankensteins who lead deeply meaningless lives fawning mindlessly on brainless celebrity.

In Hollywood, all human values besides cash are regarded as sad nostalgia. Art? Money. Profundity? Money. Love? Money. People? Money.

This perhaps makes the political lectures of Robert Redford and Whoopi Goldberg a mite unseemly. American public discourse is now entirely a branch of the entertainment industry. Truth? Money.

In short, the movies are dead and bloated as a corpse floating up in the East River. For God's sake stick to the wholesome oasis that is television.