If only I could make it to the Vanity Fair party, I would stand atop the bow of an ocean liner and scream with a lung full of coal dust: "I'm king of the world!"

No, I wouldn't commit such a vain act. But I imagine that it's precisely what Martin Scorsese might do in private with a few cases of Moet.

As a former film student, I think Marty should have won the Best Picture or Best Director award ages ago for "Taxi Driver" or "Raging Bull", or even "The Gangs of New York". It just goes to show how slow the Academy Awards are to react to the zeitgeist.

Hollywood has degenerated culturally. The awarding body, it seems to me, is as out of touch with the outside world as Kim Jong-il is.

Where are films like Douglas Sirk's "Imitation of Life" - made in 1959, way before the civil-rights movement - which features a fair-skinned black girl trying to pass as white to the chagrin of her mother? Juanita Moore, who played the mother, went on to become the third African-American to contend for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1960. This was a film not of its time, but way ahead of it.

Christopher Doyle, cinematographer of such films as "In the Mood for Love" and "The Quiet American", has this to say on the matter: "There's not a single person in the Oscar voting department who's under 65 years old. They don't even know how to get online. They have no idea what the real world is about. They have no visual experience any more."

If "The Departed" was awarded Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay, then we ought to have awarded the film it was based on, "Infernal Affairs", with the Best Foreign-Language Film and Best Original Screenplay awards in 2004, the year it was released in the US.

I just can't fathom the American-centric callousness of it all. Oh well, after all it is an American award.

There seems to be an insatiable need for Hollywood to repackage foreign films and make them popcorn-friendly to the American masses.

A note to Oscar announcers: "The Departed" is a remake of a Hong Kong movie and not Japanese. And Penelope Cruz is Spanish, not Mexican.

If I were Marty - having inspired generations of film-makers (not least the makers of the "Infernal Affairs" trilogy) - I would not give a damn about the Oscars.

"If Martin Scorsese can make a piece of s*** called 'The Aviator' and then go on to remake a Hong Kong film, don't you think he's lost the plot?" opined Chris Doyle, who shot some parts of the original Hong Kong version, in an interview with Filmmaker magazine.

Perhaps Oscar has indeed lost the plot.

After all, even the great Orson Welles, with his masterpiece "Citizen Kane", and Alfred Hitchcock never won an Oscar for Best Director (although Welles did pick up a Best Original Screenplay award for "Citizen Kane").

Now I really look forward to Cannes.

kinan@nationgroup.com