History hasn’t always looked kindly on the Academy Awards, with classics often missing out and groundbreaking moments few and far between.

There are only two things you really need to know about the Academy Awards: that Citizen Kane didn’t win the Oscar for best picture, and that Driving Miss Daisy did.

As we approach the 86th Academy Awards, it’s worth remembering those two sobering facts, which perfectly encapsulate the inherent foolishness of gong ceremonies in general, and the Oscars in particular.

Ask any film fan how seriously you should take the Academy Awards, and chances are they will point you toward the best director category, where the roll call of winners signally omits Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Howard Hawks, Stanley Kubrick, Jane Campion, David Lynch, Spike Lee and (most famously) Alfred Hitchcock – something that seems to suggest that, over the years, Oscar voters (whose average age is about 142) haven’t been the best judges of cinematic brilliance.

Even when they get it right, it’s often for the wrong reason – or film. Having been overlooked for decades, Martin Scorsese finally earned a best director statuette at the 79th Academy Awards for The Departed – a decent film, sure enough, but hardly on a par with Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull or Goodfellas, all of which had earned him umpteen international trophies (Baftas, Cannes awards etc) while leaving him beaten to the punch at the Oscars. When he finally got up on the stage to receive his award for The Departed, Scorsese’s first comment was: “Could you double-check the envelope?”

The best way to deal with the Oscars is to accept them for what they are; a glittering, back-slapping knees-up designed to make Hollywood feel good about itself. Despite claiming that they are “a global organisation representing the best of an international artform”, the membership of Ampas (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which was initially founded to “mediate labour disputes and improve the industry’s image”) often seem to forget that the boundaries of cinema do not begin and end with the borders of America. For example, although top prize winners The Godfather: Part II, The Last Emperor and Slumdog Millionaire all featured subtitled sequences (and the “silent film” The Artist had regionally interchangeable intertitles), no movie presented entirely in a “foreign language” has ever won the Academy Award for best film – something that speaks volumes about their myopic outlook.

It doesn’t help that the foreign language film category, introduced at the 29th Oscars (a nickname not officially adopted by the academy until 1939) to widen the outlook of the awards, boasts a convoluted selection process (each “foreign” country can submit only one movie per year) that has long been a source of controversy. This year, for example, the French hit Blue Is the Warmest Colour was excluded from Oscar eligibility on the grounds that it didn’t open in its home country before October 2013, despite winning the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival back in May. As a result, France was not allowed to put the film forward as its official Oscar contender; it could do so next year, but by then, its moment may well have passed. It will, however, compete at the Baftas in three weeks’ time, where it has a very strong chance of going home with the award for “film not in the English language”.

Other Oscar bugbears include the fact that no animated film has ever triumphed in the best picture category, despite early honorary recognition for Walt Disney, who transformed the face of the animated feature film with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs back in the 1930s. Science-fiction films too have traditionally been snubbed by Oscar, their awards tending to congregate around the categories disparagingly referred to as “technicals” – suggesting that there is something less artistically creative about conjuring eye-boggling images from thin air than acting, writing or directing. If Gravity triumphs in the Oscars’ best film category this year, it will have boldly gone where no sci-fi film (from2001: A Space Odyssey to Avatar) has gone before.

Most problematically, the Oscars have also been slow to adapt to social change, with a phalanx of white, English-speaking, middle-aged men too often dominating the major awards categories (just as they do Ampas membership itself). In 1974, Julia Phillips became the first woman to receive an Oscar for best picture as one of the producers of The Sting, while in 1977 Lina Wertmüller became the first woman to be nominated for best director, for her work on Seven Beauties – one of only four women to be nominated in that category to date. Indeed, it wasn’t until 2010 that Kathryn Bigelow finally broke the gender mould in the best director category, winning the Oscar for the Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker, an extraordinarily tense and visceral thriller.

This year may see another first – if 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen achieves victory in either the best film or best director category, then he will be the first black film-maker to do so in the entire history of the Oscars. If I were a betting man, I’d say that 12 Years has the edge over both Gravity and American Hustle for best picture, but when it comes to best director, there doesn’t seem to be much in it between McQueen and Alfonso Cuarón (for Gravity) – only the second Mexican film-maker to be named in that category, following Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu’s nomination for Babel in 2006. Other bookies’ favourites include Matthew McConaughey as best actor for Dallas Buyers Club, a role for which he failed to be nominated at the Baftas (the film was eligible, but overlooked), where Chiwetel Ejiofor now seems sure to triumph on 16 February.

In the best actress category, Meryl Streep has already broken another Oscar record this year, extending her list of nominations to 18, the most Academy nods achieved by any performer to date. If she wins for her role in the screen adaptation of Tracy Letts’s savage stage-play August: Osage County, she will equal Katharine Hepburn’s long-standing record of four Oscar statuettes – although all of Hepburn’s awards were in the best actress category (albeit one of them being a tie with Barbara Streisand), while Streep’s first win, for Kramer vs Kramer, was a supporting actress victory. Nevertheless, despite her extraordinary run of awards, Streep remains a best actress outsider this year, with not even Gravity’s Sandra Bullock (who previously won a best actress Oscar for The Blind Side) seeming able to challenge Cate Blanchett’s eye-opening turn in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine.

In the other categories, I’d love to see supporting actor/actress awards for Barkhad Abdi and Lupita Nyong’o, each outstanding in their first movie roles in Captain Phillips and 12 Years a Slave respectively. Both have a fighting chance of winning but, as always with the Oscars, there’s no such thing as a dead cert. Oscar campaigning is a ruthless (and expensive) business, and in the weeks leading up to the ceremony, the gloves come off and everything is up for grabs.

Of course, in the end, it doesn’t really matter who wins; the Oscars are, as we have seen, an essentially frivolous sideshow, the petty foibles and prejudices of which have little or nothing to do with the art of great movie-making.

If I look back at my own favourite films from the past 20 years (David Cronenberg’s Crash and A History of Violence; Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth; Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In; Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin) it’s notable how few of them have troubled the Oscars’ best picture category. When it comes to awards, I’ll look elsewhere for my movie steers.

None of which means you can’t have fun with the Academy Awards; merely, that you should accept them for what they are. In the calendar overleaf, I’ve attempted to put together a 30-day Oscar diet to get you up to speed with some of the most interesting and important wins from the jaded history of the Academy Awards. The diet dates right back to the earliest days of the Oscars, when the ceremony took place over a private banquet in the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel, and lasted a mere 15 minutes – just remember that as 2 March turns into 3 March, and you find yourself pinching yourself to stay awake as the 86th awards enters its third, or perhaps fourth hour (the 74th Oscars clocked in at 4 hours and 23 minutes).

Still, at least we have Ellen DeGeneres doing the hosting honours this year, a relief after the toe-curling embarrassment of Seth MacFarlane singing “We Saw Your Boobs” last year – one of the resounding low points of Oscar history.

So, with a month to go before the frocks come out on Hollywood’s red carpet, immerse yourself in the history of the Academy Awards with our 30-day diet, and judge for yourself how seriously you should take Oscar…

Mark Kermode – The Observer, Sunday 26 January 2014

www.theguardian.com/film/gallery/2014/jan/26/mark-kermode-30-day-oscar-diet