It’s not always fun being a jaded know-it-all, but it’s easier than being optimistic. Optimistic people have to be that way all the time, even when it’s not convenient.

Lots of people I know, including critics and bloggers who raved about it when it was released, feel like Birdman winning Best Picture is somehow an indictment of the whole awards season experience – that it was too safe or obvious or not as worthy of recognition next to films like The Grand Budapest Hotel, Selma or any number of other films. The same has been said about the wins for Best Actor/Actress, or Best Animated Film, and the lack of diversity in the nominees for the categories therein.

Whilst I do agree with a lot of people that The Grand Budapest Hotel is exceptionally good as a piece of cinema and a better movie thematically (and I’m glad it took the awards for Best Score as well as Production Design, Costume and Make-up), I think I understand why Birdman won big in the Best Picture, Director and Screenplay categories – both it and the reactions I’ve seen to it remind me of our bemused incredulity at Argo and The Artist winning a few years back.

Part of me feels like all three of these films key into a specific meta-narrative that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (for better or worse) have a very keen response to: they are all movies about the state of making movies, films that hark back to previous eras of movie-making that the Academy judging panel are nostalgic for, or that somehow filter current film-making techniques, themes and tropes through a retro-nostalgic lens.

Grand Budapest uses lots of idiosyncratic techniques unique to cinematic storytelling to tell a simple but endearing story, but it’s not exactly about cinema in the macro sense – Birdman, on every level, is a film about the current state of Hollywood, independent cinema, Broadway culture, literary criticism, celebrity, the cult of the actor, the (arguably false) dichotomy between high and low culture, and bridging the gap between the shared experience of sitting in an auditorium observing the live body versus the closed-off experience of living our lives through a series of screens. It is a movie in which an actor typecast as a superhero seeks to reinvent himself as a theatre actor/director and gain recognition as a serious artiste, but his public persona is inextricably tied to the kind of culture we as an audience consume and the increasingly solipsist ways in which we consume it. And the Academy eats that kind of shit up every-time, because whilst the panel are almost exclusively old white men, they are also old white film-makers, and old white film-makers love being told how awesome they used to be back in the day.

And really, it’s not as bad as all that: whilst there will always be the usual self-congratulatory syncophancy inherent to these events, at least it wasn’t devoid of hope and enjoyment. Both Graham Moore and Patricia Arquette used their wins as opportunities to talk about teen suicide and income inequality. John Legend dropped some truth-bombs about the fact that there are more black people in jail now than were slaves in 1850. Tegan and Sara (along with The Lonely Island, Mark Mothersbaugh, Questlove and Will Arnett as Batman) gave a performance of “Everything is Awesome” that will rank alongside Robin Williams’ performance of “Blame Canada” as one of the most surreal moments in Oscar history. Who cares that The LEGO Movie didn’t get a nomination for Best Animated Film – sometimes, everything is, indeed, awesome.