This year the Oscars look more like a line-up for Cannes’ The Palme d’Or or Berlin’s Golden Bear, which in keeping with Europe’s matured celluloid culture and modernist (or post-modernist) appeal, have a fetish for films with a political or psychological edge.

Hollywood is exactly the opposite and as its most discernible collaborator, so is The Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences. Assembly line production, simple, triumphant storylines that are uplifting and widely appealing, and profits have more or less characterised Hollywood filmmaking. The annual Oscars have stuck to the plot by rewarding those kinds of cinema.

But this year, suddenly, with motion pictures on every controversial issue — from alternative sexuality to alternative politics — the Oscars are looking almost European. Real, disturbing, offbeat.

Perhaps never in the history of the Awards have so many political (in every sense of the word) films been in the line up for the best awards. As if the American dream-merchants are at last waking up to the power of cinema to address real, humane issues that are close to home and yet universal in equal measure.

Let’s take a closer look. The Best Motion Picture of the year nominations includes Ang Lee’s gay cowboy romance Brokeback Mountain, Bennett Miller’s intimate biopic Capote, Paul Haggis’ metropolitan racial drama Crash, George Clooney’s gripping newsroom debate Good Night, and Good Luck and Steven Spielberg’s introspective thriller Munich.

Munich and Good Night and Good Luck (GNGL), though set in times removed from the present, carry echoes that are frighteningly contemporary. While the tale of veteran CBS newsman Edward R Murrow (GNGL) taking on the might of Senator Joseph McCarthy may be nominally about the 50s anti-communist purging, the reference to George W Bush’s gradual clawing of civil liberties in the name of countering terrorism is near home.

Similarly in Munich, the politics of hatred and the cycle of violence in the Middle-east provoke Avner (Eric Bana), the leader of a Mossad-assembled team of assassins (out to revenge the Munich massacre of athletes) to question his own legitimacy and that of the mission. Other films are no less “political.”

Crash takes a disturbingly close though redemptive look at below-the-surface racism in metropolitan America while Capote is about the sophisticated and complex gay writer Truman Capote who manipulates a small town murderer to write a book that eventually became In Cold Blood.

While homoerotic bonds between camping cowboys have long been a subtext in films, Brokeback Mountain bends all norms to have two young men fall in love, have sex and cry for lost romance when entrapped in ‘normal’ but tragic conjugality.

This is not all. Fernando Meirelles’s The Constant Gardener, an adaption of a John Le Carre, chronicles corruption and greed of a pharmaceutical company in a distant African nation and Syriana, starring George Clooney, is about a group of powerful people caught in a vast web of international conspiracies between oil cartels and shady governments stretching from Washington to the Middle East.

Then, there is North Country (on the rights of women miners), The New World (the conquest of America by whites) and Transamerica (gender-bending). Has Hollywood suddenly becoming politically responsive?

One reason for this line-up is the emergence of labels like Focus Features, Picturehouse, Sony Classics and Warner Independent, which are buying, selling and distributing arthouse material in commercial theatres.

There are other, and more, ideological reasons too. George W Bush (who is, incidentally, performing at a theatre near you) is in his second term when many of his earlier policies are showing their inherent weaknesses. His ratings have fallen. And as devastating policies like Iraq spin out of control even the compliant mainstream media is asking questions.

That films like Syriana or The Constant Gardener would be considered for production is indication enough that the days of high-decibel jingoism are over. The liberal media (which, in the US , is derided as Left) is increasingly more comfortable critiquing America and Hollywood has picked up the cry.

Also, the new breed of directors (Ang Lee, Fernando Meirelles) from other continents merge serious cinematic intentions with fresh perspectives. Even Spielberg’s moving away from celebratory Zionism to critical pacifism is a daring move towards more universal acceptability. Such convergence of issues, money and performers have made this year’s Oscars exceptional.

 But will the Academy go that extra mile and honour these films? Given the Academy’s record of playing safe, Brokeback Mountain just might beat GNGL or Munich or left-leaning Syriana to the black statue. An America turning gay is probably a more comforting idea than an America turning left.