From November to February, Los Angeles is bombarded with advertisements begging voters consider films long since gone from cinema screens.

Nominees smile their way through parties with Hollywood star makers in the hope another ballot paper will fall their way. 

But what continues to surprise is the award ceremonies’ penchant for the predictable and vain, especially for an industry that purports to be made up of liberal-minded artists. 

Take for example this year’s Academy Award for Best Picture front runner, La La Land, a bloated, deeply unoriginal Hollywood musical about, well, Hollywood.

Puzzlingly described by critics as “innovative” – the film is a scrapbook of pages torn from golden age musicals and revives the tired ‘boy meets girl in Hollywood’ trope  – the film is shortlisted for 14 awards on Oscars night next month.

It becomes the most nominated film since Titanic. 

It seems the thousands of actors who make up most of the Academy’s constituency are gushing at the prospect of another stars-in-their-eyes, dreams-of-making it-big storyline sweeping the red carpet.

The same, self-obsessed sentiment saw the gimmicky The Artist win the top gong in 2011 and 20 Feet from Stardom take out Best Documentary in 2014, both toppling more deserving films (see Hugo and The Act of Killing).

Voters took the easy option this year when it came to the acting categories as well. 

Meryl Streep may well be the greatest actress of our generation, but a Best Actress nod for her clownish turn in Florence Foster Jenkins seems more to do with tipping her number of nominations into the 20s than anything she did in the film. 

One can’t help but think her best performance of the year, a scintillating take down of then President-Elect Donald Trump at the Golden Globes, rallied enough votes to edge her ahead of more deserving contenders Amy Adams and Annette Bening.

Best Actress favourite Natalie Portman’s lauded performance as Jackie Kennedy is more an affectation than an embodiment of the former first lady, and one that leaves the audience chilly at best. 

Her first Oscar, for the remarkable thriller Black Swan, was gutsy and shocking, but her 2017 success seems off the back of simply recreating a real life person.

Biographical roles are a well-worn way to win an Academy Award, one Nicole Kidman (The Hours), Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln) and Streep (The Iron Lady) know well.    

All are great performers, but all are evidence that a win can come not by being the best, but by the audience feeling obliged to call them such.  

Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t win the highest honour in film acting for his perfectly-observed Blood Diamond performance or his manic Wolf of Wall Street turn.

He won it for being carried – literally – through long, tepid sequences in last year’s The Revenant.  

The omissions are as startling as the nominations themselves. 

Where was the love for Hailee Steinfeld, whose performance in The Edge of Seventeen elevated the teen genre beyond holiday fodder, or Emily Blunt? The Brit’s turn in The Girl on the Train was more nuanced than Rosalind Pike’s nominated Gone Girl performance.  

Even Ed O’Neill – yes, Al Bundy! – offered more than most nominated performers when voicing the bitter octopus Hank in Pixar sequel Finding Dory. 

But nominating an actor for playing a destructive teenager or a domestic violence victim or even an octopus would require the sort of imagination and bravery a self-obsessed Hollywood can’t seem to muster.