Tony Earnshaw: Lights, camera, action, and that's another year at the Oscars

True, Avatar was trounced 6-3 by The Hurt Locker and another little film triumphed where a lumbering CGI behemoth might once have thundered across the stage howling its ego to the rafters.

Laid-back good guy Jeff Bridges finally lifted a shiny statuette in glory, and Sandra Bullock followed Julia Roberts by swapping commercial fluff for "A Film With A Message".

But scrape away the patina of excitement and a lot more truth comes into play. Unlike the example of Slumdog Millionaire, which came out of nowhere to lay waste to the expectations of the Los Angeles cognoscenti, The Hurt Locker actually represents American filmmaking at its most obvious.

This is a movie made to entertain: a bomb-disposal thriller focusing on a current, unpopular war that casts its central hero as a devil-may-care cowboy with a cavalier disregard for the rules, logic or common sense.

It may have been made by a woman, thus allowing Kathryn Bigelow to lay claim to making history as the first female to be crowned Best Director, but The Hurt Locker is about as authentic, plausible and factual as The Great Escape.

Thus it is that a film that limped on to the circuit in 2008 and was given a second lease of life via fan pressure to make it on to the Oscar slate. It doesn't mean it was the best film of 2010; maybe a lot of Academy voters simply didn't like James Cameron...

I'm pleased for Jeff Bridges, but it really was only a matter of time before this very popular and hard-working man got his dues. Like Paul Newman, who won in 1987, for The Color of Money (and Martin Scorsese, who picked up Best Director three years ago for The Departed) it was a matter of rewarding someone before they ran out of time.

And Sandra Bullock? Like Julia Roberts, who bagged the gong for Erin Brockovich in 2001, it was payment for being box office gold and making millions and millions. Hollywood sure does love a time-server, and Bullock has put in her hours.

I was delighted to see the deserving Christophe Waltz and Mo'Nique honoured for their roles in Inglourious Basterds and Precious, respectively. That meant that old-timers such as Christopher Plummer and rising stars like Maggie Gyllenhaal were passed over. But the right people got the Oscar, and that's what matters.

I feel sorry for Plummer because, nominated for his first Academy Award at the age of 79, he most likely won't get another chance. But then greats like Peter O'Toole and Richard Burton never won, either, despite 15 nominations between them. I don't count O'Toole's honorary award in 2003.

Still, that's the nature of Oscar. Just occasionally it goes to a deserving winner. It's all a lottery and, underneath the ballyhoo, it really is just a load of back-slapping baloney sheathed in glitter.

Here's to 2011...