SO I HAD dinner with Tom Cruise the other night.

Before you ask, it was a huge disappointment. There was no weeping; no jumping around and/or screaming; no lecturing on the dark history of psychiatry; no catty remarks about Brooke Shields’s medicine cabinet; and no blank-eyed evangelising about Katie Holmes and/or L. Ron Hubbard. Just a bit of polite, gentle conversation, a bowl of soup, some chicken and a chocolate pudding. None of which Mr Cruise touched.

Naturally, there were a few others at the dinner. Oh, all right: several hundred others. That was because it was the 2005 Britannia Awards, hosted by the Los Angeles chapter of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (Bafta).

The annual five-hour event is sponsored by British Airways, which is appropriate, because it feels like a long-haul flight to London. You sit there, dehydrated and slightly boozed, wedged into a narrow seat, shivering from the air conditioning and staring dumbly at a distant video screen.

Cruise, who arrived at the black-tie ceremony at the last minute with Holmes, his pregnant girlfriend, was up for the most prestigious gong of the night: the Stanley Kubrick Britannia Award for Excellence in Film.

The actor should, of course, have been up for the more appropriate David Blunkett Award for Self-Inflicted Career Implosion, after his aforementioned outbursts during this summer’s publicity campaign for Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds, in which he starred. But the people at Bafta are far too good for that kind of japery. Besides, they wanted to meet the star of Top Gun and Mission: Impossible, and see if he did anything, well, crazy.

In the end, we were all disappointed. Cruise’s speech was bland to the point of tedium. “I hope to continue to earn your respect for my contribution to film making,” he told us, with a serious, movie-star look, in contrast to the self-deprecating jokes that Tom Hanks had cracked the previous year after receiving the same gong.

Yet the theory persists in Hollywood that Cruise’s journey from billion-dollar human franchise to ranting Scientologist loon marks the death of the traditional image-managed movie star, and, perhaps more to the point, the death of the movie-star publicist. This is because the actor’s problems began after he fired his terrifying celebrity handler, Pat Kingsley, and replaced her with his sister, Lee Anne DeVette.

But perhaps Cruise is smarter than we think. After all, we live in more open times. Reality TV has conditioned us to expect extreme candour from our celebrities. The media itself has also changed. Carefully negotiated Vanity Fair cover stories are now competing with the likes of Jessica Morgan and Heather Cocks, who have zero celebrity access yet draw a huge audience by simply insulting movie stars on a website called gofugyourself.com (the “fug ” apparently stands for “frightfully ugly”).

At the same time, reality TV shows are creating a weekly slew of new micro-celebrities, who are in turn feeding a new kind of celebrity press. There are now more paparazzi in the bushes of LA than ever before.

The balance of power in Hollywood has changed. The likes of Kingsley used to manage every detail of their clients’ images through bullying and obfuscation. But today’s press is virtually uncontrollable. And, with the marketing costs of movies rising to GDP levels, even A-listers need the free publicity of a People magazine cover shot every so often.

So did Cruise simply fug himself, pre-emptively? Consider the alternative: the actor could have used War of the Worlds to go on another tired jog around the celebrity talk-show circuit, smiling and saying nothing as viewers switched off and went online instead, where he would have been fugged anyway for his chilly detachment. Instead, Cruise owned the media for the entire summer.

And look at the box office data for War of the Worlds. It has so far taken $590 million, more than any other movie in Cruise’s career.

But even Cruise seems to be doubting his own genius. Last week he hired a new über-publicist from the old school, Paul Bloch, who was probably responsible for that terrible, lifeless speech to Bafta at the Beverly Hilton.

Cruise is making a terrible mistake. And I fear that Mission: Impossible III, due out next year, could suffer. Come back, Lee Anne DeVette. Your brother needs you.

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