For the first time in their jealous history the Baftas have stolen a march on the Oscars.

Let’s be honest. It is pure and simple vengeance. The billion-dollar Oscar bonanza has been smuggled to London and no one in Hollywood has had the balls to blink. But what have we done with this gargantuan privilege? We have squandered it.

The award for Best Film has gone to a great British mess called Atonement. It won’t get near an Oscar unless someone calls a plumber.

The Coen brothers have slipped their fingers around the Best Director award for their blood-splattered cartoon, No Country for Old Men.

And Marion Cotillard has done a quite extraordinary thing by winning the Best Actress award for a universally panned film, La Vie en Rose. She is marvellous as Edith Piaf in this melodrama but I have yet to meet anyone else who has seen it.

Thank God for Daniel Day-Lewis. I saw him in Berlin last night signing autographs outside the cinema at the premiere of There Will Be Blood and I felt a little like Dr Who.

The actor had won absolutely everything for his performance in this terrific Paul Thomas Anderson film but he is such a rare bird. The Bafta for Best Actor is never, ever a given, but Day-Lewis is now the shoo-in for the Oscar.

What was at stake last night was far more than protests and prizes. The annual bout between the British and American academies is the biggest grudge match in the history of cinema.

For once the Brits seemed to have won. The writers’ strike has left deep scars. We now know that no one in America is capable of opening an envelope without Woody Allen scribbling the address stage left. We also know that these glittering awards mean nothing without an audience. Thus our glories.

The disappointment is that there are plenty of films that have simply fallen off the map, notably Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

My sincere hope is that one day the academies on both sides of the pond will square their dates if only to make it an even tighter race.

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