No quibble with the gongs handed out this week. Not to those honoured at the Evening Standard Theatre Awards, where people tend to be nicer than in the film world (Simon Russell Beale, who I met for the first time, is charming), nor to those at the British Independent Film Awards, where a colleague assures me Daniel Craig was far funnier and friendlier than the grouchy image perpetuated by the media (he was great company over dinner at last year's Evening Standard Film Awards, too). Nice to see Craig sticking up for the British film industry in a sensible rather than an emptily patriotic or wishful way, and nice to see the BIFA's offsetting crowd-pleasers (anointing Craig, Judi Dench and Ray Winstone) with a host of awards to the defiantly arty and enigmatic Control. With the kerfuffle of these two heavyweight ceremonies, a lesser known honour might have slipped your attention. Marisa Tomei has, apparently, starred in the 'best' nude scene of 2007 in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, according to the anonymous geltelemen who run a website called Mrskin, apparently an authority in such matters. Tomei beat not only Page Three girl Keeley Hawes in Cashback (must have missed that one...), but also Christina Ricci in Black Snake Moan, Sienna Miller in Factory Girl, and Natalie Portman, whose chaste disrobing in Hotel Chevalier caused a media frenzy. Now, I saw BTDNYD this week and I could tell you it's a shame that a film displying the artful dramatic hand of 82-year-old Sidney Lumet, and featuring a crackling confrontation between Albert Finney and Philip Seymour Hoffman, should first come to attention here thanks to a flash of flesh. But the truth is Tomei is devastatingly sexy in a triptych of bedroom scenes, not least because she was 40 at the time of filming and looks surgically un-enhanced, but also because each scene has a tang of despair to it that strengthens the film's remorseless spiral into tragedy. I've long thought Tomei is a brilliant comedian and a strong dramatic actress, as well as a woman who could make me go weak at the knees just by smiling, but her award-winning sex scenes here aren't good because she makes them look sexy, but because she makes them look real.

If I were Ridley Scott, I'd be proper narked. Every interview with him prior to the release of American Gangster harped on the accepted line that he's a dealer in facile imagery, a purveyor of images that are pretty but shallow. You can take the man out of the advertising industry.... the reasoning goes. No matter how many genres he works in, no matter how ambitious his intentions, he will never be an auteur.

Well, in riposte, I'd just like to compare American Gangster with The Departed, a multiple-Oscar-winning work by that great American auteur, Martin Scorcese. The former is an urgent, pacy, true-life account of one black businessman/gangster's progress to the top of the heroin trade in 1970s New York, and the ambivalent morality of the cop chasing him. The latter is a hoky tale of betrayal and corruption in the Irish mob and the Boston police force, awash with operatic catholicism and father-son conflict. The former has a washed-out, beige colour scheme true to the decade in which it is set, and rare outbursts of authentically clumsy, blunt violence. The latter has a brash colour palette and lots of flamboyant mayhem - flowering gunshot wounds etc. The former has paunchy Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe delivering understated performances, the latter had Jack Nicholson plyaing under his age and way over the top (surprise!), and di Caprio and Damon preeening. I could go on. It's not that I disliked The Departed. I enjoyed it, the way one enjoys a guilty pleasure. But American Gangster is a far superior film on almost every level. Of coruse, it won't win an Oscar. Because it's by Ridley Scott. And he's "not an auteur".

Not much time to tell you about Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf in 3-D, except that the motion-capture animation process has such a flattening, dehumanising, Botox-ing effect on the actors voicing and providing the physical inspiration for the characters, that the film seems less expressive than the average, 2-D animation. It's distancing, alienating, off-putting - even the sight of Angelina Jolie naked except for a few dabs of gold fluid and (ridiculously) built-in high heels, normally something I and the rest of the straight male population would pay good money to see. And the script is terrible, littered with snigger-worthy lines and anachronism (was the word "gobble" really a slang term in ancient Denmark?).

Next time - The Kite Runner and I'm Not There. Tune in, film fans.