We're barely into its second week and the Cannes Film Festival has proven, yet again, and more than ever, what a joke it has become.

A festival that began with the noblest of intentions - as a counterpoint to the cultural fascism sweeping prewar Europe - has become a paean to hype and hucksterism. At Cannes, the belief now seems to be that while art movies are well and good, all roads eventually lead to Hollywood. Just ask the legions of Tinseltown heavyweights - the Brad Pitts, Johnny Depps and Colin Farrells - expected in town over the next week (there's even, gasp, the Peaches Geldofs and Myleen Klasses, who have arrived noisily to play their part).

And then there are the movies. The choice of Disney's Up for the opening night tells you everything about modern Cannes. It is a 3-D animation from a multinational corporation famed until recently, through its fast-food tie-ins, for coating young heartstrings with cholesterol just as it was tugging at them. The film, about an old man who flies his house to South America with the aid of party balloons, apparently brought grown critics to tears in its first 15 minutes.

That is no doubt a source of much relief for the festival programmers who must have felt like Tinseltown touts for selling the soul of Cannes for a soupçon of Hollywood limelight yet again. Last year's opening film, the execrable Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, nearly swamped the festival in bad buzz.

This is not reflex antagonism on my part, but an appreciation that Cannes matters (or used to).

The festival was started in 1939 as a challenge to the Fascist toadies in Mussolini's Italy who ran the Venice Film Festival. In 1938, when Jean Renoir's antiwar parable La Grande Illusion was beaten to the top prize by Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia (an homage to the 1936 Berlin Olympics commissioned by Goebbels, featuring taut Teutonic bodies and loving close-ups of Hitler), a group of film-makers and critics petitioned the French Government to establish a festival that was politically aware but not ideologically subservient.

But forget all that. Up made some film critics cry in the first 15 minutes. So that's a good thing.

The big news over the weekend from Cannes was that the director of the British hit Calendar Girls will team up with Bob Hoskins and Sally Hawkins (from Happy Go Lucky) to make We Want Sex, a jaunty Brit-com about women workers at Ford's Dagenham plant who went on strike for equal rights in 1968. Naturally, it will be a hoot, but you could choke on the irony of its being announced in Cannes.

In 1968, the festival was brought to a shuddering halt by politically aware film-makers such as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Louis Malle and Milos Forman. They held an impromptu press conference demanding the closure of Cannes as a gesture of support for striking workers at the Renault factory in Boulogne-Billancourt and the striking students of Paris. Forman withdrew his movie (The Fireman's Ball) from the festival; there were sit-down protests outside the Palais; and harsh words were exchanged - Godard was caught on camera yelling at a critic: “We're talking about solidarity with students and workers, and you're speaking of travelling shots and close-ups! You're a prick!” The festival closed for business. Mission accomplished.

It is hard to pinpoint when the rot set in. Some say it was 1994, when Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction won the Palme d'Or. Tarantino was booed when he went up to collect it. The sight of the former video store geek, giggling nervously on stage, being celebrated for a movie that, ultimately, is about other movies, was too much for some. It signalled a new era of thrilling but empty irony.

Today, Cannes boasts arthouse film-makers such as Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke. Both will be in town this week, and are previous Cannes winners. They are prodigiously talented, but make solipsistic movies, sometimes shocking and controversial, but speaking of nothing other than Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke. Apparently, von Trier's “controversial” Antichrist, featuring castration and self-mutilation, has, in classic Cannes style, sent sensitive critics fleeing for the exits.

These hucksters are the Godards and the Truffauts of our day. Cannes is their festival. And they are far removed from the generation who so believed that their work could penetrate deep into the politics of daily life that they were prepared to sabotage their careers and shut down their own films.

Perhaps fittingly, Tarantino has returned to the scene of the crime, bearing his boys' own romp, Inglourious Basterds, starring Brad Pitt. Set during the Second World War, it follows a fictitious band of American-Jewish soldiers in occupied France who capture and torture Nazis. Entirely politically vacuous, full of Hollywood glamour and, presumably, hugely entertaining, it's all very Cannes. But surely Cannes should strive for more?

This form of cultural anaemia isn't the preserve of Cannes alone. The entire media and their consumers have, for decades now, regarded the world of film as a glitzy hunting ground for stars and celebrities and as a place where talents tread a well-worn path from small-town obscurity to the Hollywood highlife.

Until viewers and critics alike begin to look deeply into films, how they're made and who makes them, as the festival founders did long before us, we will continue to get the Cannes that we truly deserve.

Times Recommends

• How to stop the Queen picking the next PM
• To save the planet, strike a deal with Big Oil
• Bankers think it’s all over. Time to think again