With the world waiting with anything but bated breath for the verdict of Isabelle Huppert's jury for the winner of this year's Palme d'or, the time seems right for a diatribe about the state of both mainstream and arthouse cinema.

They may keep critics and showbiz reporters busy for a few days, but will the features in competition at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival prove to be any less historically inconsequential than the largely underwhelming titles lauded at this year's Academy Awards? When the line-up was announced, Variety predicted that visitors to La Croisette would witness a `heavyweight auteur smackdown'. But how many of the big names competing for the most prestigious prize on the festival circuit actually deserve to be called `auteurs'?

There's no doubting the credentials of 86 year-old Alain Resnais, who, six decades after making his first film, shows no sign of slowing down with the comedy, Les Herbes Folles. But while Pedro Almodóvar, Michael Haneke and Gaspar Noé all have distinctive styles, do they really conform to the type defined 55 years ago by François Truffaut when he was still an angry young critic?

Tsai Ming-Liang (who pays hommage to Truffaut in Visage) similarly appends a signature to his work, as does Ken Loach, although he rarely writes his own screenplays. But as for the remaining contenders, they are a glorious mix of ciné-provocateurs, calligraphic artisans and political polemicists.

Coming in the year that marks the 50th anniversary of the Cannes eruption of the nouvelle vague, the 2009 Oscars not only demonstrated the failure of the likes of Truffaut, Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard to transform mainstream cinema, but they also suggested that instead of making film-making more personal and audiovisually audacious, the likes of Les 400 Coups, Hiroshima Mon Amour and A Bout de Souffle succeeded only in furnishing the tropes that have made commercial movies more generic, artificial and crass.

In January 1954, inspired by Alexandre Astruc's theory of le caméra stylo and the writings of Cahiers du Cinéma editor André Bazin, Truffaut published an astonishing assault on popular film `A Certain Tendency in French Cinema' remains one of the most trenchant articles ever written about the so-called Seventh Art. In it, Truffaut denounced contemporary French directors like Jean Delannoy, Yves Allégret, René Clément, Marcel Pagliero and Claude Autant-Lara as `littérateurs', who were more concerned with doing justice to scripts by such psychological realists as Jacques Sigurd, Henri Jeanson, Robert Scipion, Roland Laudenbach and the team of Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost than in creating cinema.

Having savaged a number of recent releases, Truffaut dismissed this `cinéma du papa' and called for film-makers to follow the example of Jean Renoir, Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau, Jacques Becker, Abel Gance, Max Ophüls, Jacques Tati and Roger Leenhardt, who invested their work with an artistry and personality that identified them as metteurs en scène rather than simply megaphone-wielding journeymen. Eventually, the names of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Nicholas Ray and Roberto Rossellini would be added to this pantheon of `auteurs', as, indeed would Truffaut himself.

For the next few years, `auteur theory' became something of a touchstone for trendy critics. But a well-publicised feud between Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael did much to discredit the notion that the director was a movie's sole creative arbiter and stars, screenwriters and producers have been scrambling ever since to ensure that everybody recognises their contribution to a picture's artistic legitimacy and box-office clout.

All of which leaves one wondering whether the much-vaunted nouvelle vague actually achieved anything worthwhile at all.

Pre-occupied with their own demise, the Hollywood studios largely resisted innovations like the jump cut, improvised dialogue and self-reflexivity. Indeed, apart from the machine-gunning montage in Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and some slo-mo savagery in Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), such artsy tricksiness was viewed with suspicion and was deflected off into anarchic TV shows, advertising and pop promos. However, these gimmicky techniques have subsequently been seized upon by the makers of mega-budget blockbusters in a bid to disguise the plasticity of their CGI effects or visceralise action sequences that would otherwise be devoid of imagination, ingenuity or excitement.

Despite their limited cinematic impact, New Wave aesthetics did make it on to film school curricula and the Movie Brats of the 1970s were quick to appropriate as many auteur affectations as possible, including that risible legend, `A Film By...'.

However, there's a vast difference between pushing the boundaries of an artform and promoting the cult of the celebrity director. The likes of Lucas, Spielberg, Dante and Zemeckis all considered themselves cinéastes. Yet they infantilised American cinema just as Altman, Ashby, Coppola and Cassavetes were persuading post-Production Code audiences to accept it as a medium for the kind of adult subject matter that international film-makers had been tackling for years.

Some may claim that the Oscar accolades for Milk and The Reader and the Cannes inclusion of films about Keats (Bright Star), Mussolini's wife Ida Dalser (Vincere), Palestine since 1948 (The Time That Remains), homosexuality in China (Spring Fever) and predatory grooming (Fish Tank) demontrate that the advocates of grown-up cinema triumphed in the end. But such politically liberal, artistically conservative features provide conclusive proof that we are deeply mired in another era of meticulously scripted, exquisitely designed and earnestly enacted mediocrity.

This cinéma du tableau will always do well during the US award season, as it maintains the illusion that there is more to the American film industry than bums on seats and balance sheets. But it's unlikely that there will be anything culturally significant in 20 years time about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon or Doubt. They are simply big-screen examples of masterpiece theatre that have been designed to make middlebrow audiences feel intelligent and allow self-indulgent directors to dub themselves auteurs and image-conscious stars to pose as thespians.

Cinema isn't dead. Far from it. But half a century has passed since it was last shaken up by theorists and practitioners who believed that moving images should do more than provide mere escapist spectacle. We are long overdue a movie revolution led by ideas rather than technology. But, with corporates palliating the masses with vacuous comic-book extravaganzas and superficial pseudo-literary melodramas, it's hard to see who will liberate an artform that hasn't even vaguely begun to fulfil it potential from the dumbed-down democratisation of the multiplex mentality.