Hooray for Hollywood

And the Best Picture of the year is...who knows? The Oscars are, however, a useful indicator in this aspect as they will almost invariably tell you what isn't the best film of the past year (i.e. the winner and any of the nominees) and point simultaneously in the direction of what might be - to wit, the best film in a foreign language, which, although fairly arbitrarily chosen from a vast global pool and thus tending to be the one most effectively marketed to the Academy's voters, will nevertheless be a safe bet in most years to trump the English-language winner in substance if not budget. You'd probably have to go back 15 years to Schindler's List to find in favour of the Hollywood product.
Be that as it may, apparently the British came and conquered. This means that a British director with an Indian cast won Best Picture, which automatically comes with the Best Director award and an entourage of other trinkets as giving the Best Picture winner that award alone isn't deemed adequate recognition of the work's accomplishment these days. It's much like the Manager of the Year award in football for whoever steers one of the wealthiest ensembles to the league title.
Although apparently this was actually an Indian conquest anyway. Reportage took on an increasingly loopily looped air with each repetition of 'Indian triumph'. I really expected Sanjeev Bhaskar's Mr 'Everything is Indian' to turn up any minute. Never mind the Danny Boyle effigies burning in the Patna slums. No, Indians should celebrate the global attention that their film industry will get out of this. For 15 minutes, anyway, until that global attention deduces that the bulk of Indian cinema is still the twee populist slop it was before the Oscars.
Meanwhile, as for the British triumph, art imitated life to greatly comic effect as Kate Winslet finally got hers for the holocaust thing. Oh, and after Heath Ledger's shoo-in curtailed Mickey Rourke's chances (there's a quota on winners who are also special effects), Sean Penn got the benefit of doubt for his litany of reassuringly manly real-world escapades which enabled the voters to reward him for a militant homo role with a clear conscience.