I hope someone by now has told Neil Patrick Harris how to pronounce David Oyelowo’s surname, but if anyone wants to see how not to host an Oscars, Harris’s stewardship of the 87th annual Academy Awards can provide that service in spades.

If ever an Oscar ceremony pointed to the fundamentally schizoid nature these days of Hollywood’s defining love-in, the 86th annual Academy Awards was it. On the one hand, you had an out-gay host in Ellen DeGeneres taking selfies, ordering pizza, and generally trying to treat the crowd at the Dolby auditorium as an extension of her own funky, vaguely edgy persona.

Here's the astonishing thing about the 2014 Oscars: for the first time in memory, there are actually three or four nominees that - dare one say it? - actually merit consideration as the year's best. Is this because films are actually getting better? That seems a perverse argument to make amid a climate when so much talent is migrating away from cinema towards TV or even the stage (Steven Soderbergh, for instance, who is in rehearsals with a play Off Broadway).

“Follow the instructions."

David Lean’s suggestion to a costume designer shows the importance of the script – a film’s “recipe”. This is why the Oscar categories for Best Adapted Screenplay and Original Screenplay are so important: without great bones, we'd have nothing good to watch.

Is it just me or are the Oscars getting better? I don't necessarily mean the show itself, rather the films selected for nomination and the eventual winners. In recent years we've seen films as brilliant and diverse as The Artist, The Hurt Locker and No Country for Old Men take the top prize.

The 2014 Oscar nominations are out, and many of the expected awards-season favourites will be popping yet another champagne cork tonight (or, given that the nods take place at 5.30 am in Los Angeles, maybe over breakfast).

Emmanuelle Riva travelled all the way to Los Angeles for that? I doubt I’m the only one whose heart went out to the radiant French actress, newly turned 86, as the 85th annual Academy Awards drew to a long and lumbering close well into its fourth hour.

Given the quantity of uncertain outcomes, this year's Academy Awards guarantee excitement, and there's nothing better than an Oscars ceremony filled with surprises. Furthermore, the selection of films nominated this year are of a rare vintage.

Time is drawing nigh to mark those Oscar ballots, but what movie should one vote for as the year's best? While odds-makers have been busily touting one title over another, the less-vaunted fact about this year's shortlist is that relatively few stinkers have made the cut.

Frank Capra called the Oscars “the most valuable, but least expensive, item of world-wide public relations ever invented by any industry”. They are, like it or not, the film awards against which all others are judged - even to the point that other countries’ film awards are scheduled in relation to the ceremony. Despite being the accepted mark of excellence, the Oscars are not a meritocracy. The choice of one art work/film product over another is, necessarily, irrational and Oscars' critics often say AMPAS members are too old and out of touch to cast such important votes.