Last night's show featured a bizarre James Bond tribute – while failing to duly honour visionary director David Lynch. That choice spoke to the awards' profound identity crisis.

Early on in Sunday's three-and-three-quarter hour Academy Awards ceremony, there was a tribute to the James Bond franchise, consisting of a Broadway dance routine from Margaret Qualley and three classic theme songs belted out by Lisa, Doja Cat and Raye. It was a strange segment, not just because no Bond films have been released in the past three years, but because the series' long-time custodians, Barbara Broccoli and Michael G Wilson, have just handed over control of their family business to Amazon. Considering that so many of the evening's speeches praised cinema and the cinema-going experience, it was embarrassing that the Academy's 007 tribute coincided with the selling of one of cinema's most spectacular, big-screen-worthy assets to a streaming service.

Wouldn't a tribute to the late David Lynch have been more apposite? Lynch, who died in January, is regarded as one of modern American film's most singular visionaries – and he was a four-time Oscar nominee and an honorary Oscar winner to boot. Yet he merited just a few seconds in the In Memoriam montage. Later in the ceremony, though, there was time for a tribute to the late Quincy Jones, who is undoubtedly a legendary figure, but more in the music world than film. This sequence consisted of Queen Latifah's performance of Ease on Down the Road, a song from The Wiz (1978) which was produced but not written by Jones. With all due respect, do any film fans believe that The Wiz merits more attention than such Lynch masterpieces as The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive?

Presumably the producers of the Oscars do – and that could be why the institution has such a profound identity crisis. Glance at the list of winners, and you'll see that this was probably the most radical celebration of innovative, low-budget cinema in Oscar history. And yet the cheesy and clichéd ceremony is lagging decades behind the tastes of its voters.

The biggest winners of the night were Anora and The Brutalist, two independent films made by auteurs with big ideas and tiny budgets. (Last year we had Barbenheimer. This year we had… Brutanora? The Anoralist? Maybe not.) Brady Corbet's defiantly serious period drama, The Brutalist, won the Oscars for score, cinematography and leading actor (Adrien Brody's........

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