If the ceremony raised any broader question, it is whether we have finally seen the demise of the Hollywood Oscar-bait movie. For decades, the Best Picture category was dominated by high-sheen, middle-brow, supposedly uplifting, politically liberal epics, from “Gandhi” to “Dances With Wolves” to “The English Patient”. They were usually based on novels or true stories, they tended to be on the dull side, and, in the 1990s, they were often driven to award-nabbing glory by the campaigning of Miramax’s head honcho at the time, Harvey Weinstein. If you were the kind of person who only went to the cinema once a year, you could see such a film and come away with the comforting assurance that Hollywood (and its British counterpart) was still making well-crafted, largely humourless entertainment. But times have changed: in recent years, the Best Picture line-up has skewed ever more low-budget, quirky and unpredictable. Anybody who plumped for “Birdman” as their annual cinema outing would have stumbled out of the cinema wondering what on earth they had just seen.