JUST like tax time, the film awards season annually elicits the inevitable moans and gibes. It's a luvvie fest. It's a chance for Cher, or Bjork, or latterly Tilda Swinton to run amok in the reduced-to-clear section of a fancy dress shop. There are snubs and oversights; the gall! You hear it every year: Why on Earth did they nominate that?
Movie awards used to be perceived and promoted as a stamp of quality, an acknowledgement that these are the finest films of the year. We're a lot more cynical now. The Oscars are a popularity contest, and they don't reward good film – just films that
make the film industry feel good about itself. We're better people for making these movies, these awards say, and you'll be better for watching them.
This is why overweight big-star epics, tasteful family-life tearjerkers, stultifying high-toned adaptations, and elephantine biopics or costume pictures have dominated nominees and winners. And since the Baftas changed the date of its own movie soirée, it now operates as a handy preview to the way the American Academy may vote. This has also had a dramatic effect on the Baftas' glitter count. Suddenly all the American stars and directors who could not be here tonight found space in their diaries for one last piece of high-profile exposure.
But there's at least one movie awards ceremony on the calendar that has a slightly handknitted feel, by which I mean it is lumpy, quirky and unlikely to wrap itself around Brad or Meryl or Clint. Tonight's Scottish Baftas are more likely to have nominee Daniela Nardini snoozing exhausted in a chair by the end – which is where I found her a few years back, after a trip to the loo – and the reassuring presence of touchstones such as Bill Paterson, who will be on the red carpet tonight with David Hayman, and any Scottish newsreader they can find who is female, blonde and comely.
On being told he was about to be honoured with a his lifetime achievement award, the late great film director Billy Wilder immediately griped: "There are two things you can count on at my time of life: awards and haemorrhoids. And they're both a pain in the butt."
When you're at the end of a bravura career, that is a reasonable view to take, but unlike other ceremonies, Scottish Baftas tend to champion those closer to the beginning. Awards at this stage are, at the very least, a jumpstart to a career, and a means of generating a bit of interest and awareness. I rather admire New York's The Gothams for acknowledging that movie awards ceremonies are partly marketing exercises and then making a virtue out of this by creating a category to boost movies that need that kind of exposure. The "Best Film Not Playing At A Theatre Near You" has often helped festival hits find distribution. The Scottish Baftas seem to have taken this idea to the next level. At least one of this year's nominees for best film was without a distributor before Scottish Bafta nominations were announced. Now a bidding war has broken out with several companies vying to buy up the rights. Yes, maybe George Clooney won't go to bed tonight gazing soulfully at the empty Bafta Scotland space on his awards shelf, but the Scottish Baftas are far more meaningful to its recipients.
Every country has an annual awards ceremony – the Cesars, the Goyas, the Genies or the Guldbagges – but usually the awards that the entertainment industry gives to itself in humble recognition of its own sheer fabulousness are dull affairs where tearful people take forever to thank their family and God. The Scottish Baftas, on the other hand, are still fun and the winners are self-deprecating. Carting home his first ever gong for Sweet Sixteen, Martin Compston confided that it would now hang in the place currently occupied by his school swimming certificate.
This year's Baftas honour dramas that sound as if they belong on the edgier fringes of iTunes (New Town Killers, Wasted, Peter In Radioland) or in Victorian penny dreadfuls (The Unloved, Crying With Laughter). No matter what you think of them individually, they constitute one of the most varied and eclectic best-picture rosters. And while other movie bashes have turned into airport lounges, Bafta Scotland still has a slightly chaotic feel, fuelled by the weirdness of what qualifies as Scottish nowadays (Holby City?), the occasional excitable sweary presenter (good evening, Ford Kiernan) and the remarkable quantity that is our indigenous talent.
The 2009 Bafta Scotland awards are at Glasgow Science Centre, tonight, with red carpet arrivals from 5pm. Live webstream and nominees at www.baftascotland.co.uk• This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 08/11/09