Special: The overblown world of Oscars

This year's Academy Awards are a salutary lesson to anyone who has ever complained that Hollywood does not do enough to celebrate world cinema. Providing that piece of world cinema is an hour-and-a-half-long celebration of Hollywood, it might even win Best Picture.

In pictures: Full list of Oscar winners

In pictures: Memorable moments at the Oscars

Mark my words: Memorable quotes from Oscars

It's a mark of just how gloriously daft the Oscars has become that the ceremony can make a victory for a French film - and a silent, black-and-white one, come to that - feel like a predictable, self-administered slap on the back for the American film industry. In fact, both of this year's most garlanded films have been described as "love letters to the movies", and the affection shown to both by the Academy was undoubtedly a reciprocal billet-doux.

The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius's irrepressibly charming celebration of silent cinema, received honours for Best Picture and Best Director, along with awards for its leading man Jean Dujardin, its score and its costume design. Martin Scorsese's Hugo, a moist-eyed, 3D tribute to film's French founding fathers, won the expected raft of technical trophies for its visual effects, sound editing, sound mixing, art direction and cinematography. As someone who found Scorsese's first foray into three dimensions coolly impressive, if not particularly moving, and who tap-danced around Leicester Square with unfettered glee after seeing The Artist, this felt like an entirely fair result.

Infuriatingly, this year's Oscar ceremony offered very little scope for real disgruntlement: most of the winners were no less deserving than they were inevitable. A Separation, a justly buzzed Iranian drama now riper for remaking than ever, was a laudable choice for Best Foreign Language Film, and Christopher Plummer and Octavia Spencer's rightful triumphs in the Supporting Actor and Actress categories cap long winning streaks for both stars that took in the Golden Globes and the Baftas. (Plummer, at 82 the oldest actor to win an Academy Award, jokingly asked his trophy, "You're only two years older than me, darling - where have you been all my life?", and thereby took top honours in the unofficial and not-that-hotly-contested Best Speech category.)

The evening's two injustices were galling, but hardly unexpected. A wan Descendants script took Best Adapted Screenplay over the infinitely sharper, pithier, punchier Moneyball, and the thrilling art-historicity of The Artist's original screenplay came second to the elephantine blatancy of Woody Allen's Midnight In Paris.

Even the surprise result wasn't particularly surprising. Meryl Streep's roundly deserved victory in the Best Actress category, which brings her personal Oscar tally to three, astonished no-one apart from alleged experts such as myself, who had somehow become convinced that Viola Davis would win it for The Help. If there were awards ceremonies for awards ceremonies, Streep would be a shoo-in for Most Plausible "Who, me?" Face: her oft-repeated gawps of feigned astonishment this year have been thoroughly convincing.

For a year in which the Academy celebrated the foundations on which the film industry was built - its French vaudeville roots, the glory of the silent era, Meryl Streep winning things - the ceremony itself felt appropriately antique. Hosting for the ninth time since his 1990 debut, Billy Crystal was certainly preferable to last year's catatonic Anne Hathaway-James Franco pairing, but his shtick seemed surprisingly dated for a man with such a luxuriant crop of vibrant russet hair atop his head. (Crystal also spoofed all nine of this year's Best Picture nominees in his trademark opening showtune medley, which one feels lasted rather long enough in the days of a five-strong shortlist.)

We were also treated to a wonderfully pointless set of prerecorded black-and-white interviews - classy! - in which such industry luminaries as Adam Sandler were able to lecture the assembled likes of Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg on the virtues of cinema. "Through my films I'm eventually trying to one day tell the truth," explained an earnest Sandler, whose last picture, the cross-dressing gross-out comedy Jack and Jill, won him 11 Razzie nominations last week, including both Worst Actor and Worst Actress.

But while it's easy to be cynical about the faffing and fawning that surrounds the Academy Awards - over the years, the Academy has made sure of that - there's no harm in celebrating the awards themselves when they get it right, and The Artist's triumph is just such a case. Its victory, much like the film itself, is an unrepeatable trick; a one-off, glorious fluke; a triumph for pure, unadulterated cinema disguised as an exercise in cosy nostalgia. To be honest, I'm not even sure that Oscar voters fully comprehended what it was they were voting for — but I'm nonetheless delighted that they voted for it.

In pictures: Full list of Oscar winners

In pictures: Memorable moments at the Oscars

Mark my words: Memorable quotes from Oscars