2014 honoured worthy and 'Important' films, but 2015 will be a celebration of craftsmanship

Throwing in the towel at about 6am UK time, the 2014 Academy Awards bummed me out. I know I shouldn't have been so naïve as to expect the Oscars to actually recognise cinematic achievement, but voting seemed more motivated by politics and 'duty' than ever. 12 Years A Slave triumphed thanks to its Important Subject Matter, Dallas Buyers Club's honours felt like the perfunctory conclusion of the "McConnaissance", and The Wolf of Wall Street (though admittedly an uneven film) was overlooked because the world suddenly decided that depiction equates to endorsement.

"Possibility number one: 12 Years a Slave wins best picture," host Ellen DeGeneres said during the ceremony. "Possibility number two: You're all racists," though the truly damning indictment would come a few weeks later, when several members of the academy admitted to having voted for Steve McQueen's drama without even having seen it.

But things are looking up as we head into the 2015 awards season, with the films that will dominate it having surfaced thanks to the sheer force of their cinematic ambition.

Boyhood will probably be the most decorated and deservedly so, a film with a production process that was both fastidious and unbound – filmed religiously each year for 12 years but with a script adapted by writer-director Richard Linklater to move with the tides of each member of its aging cast.

Birdman was also a film to get you excited about cinema again, taking themes as disparate as the tragic effect of dwindling modern attention spans, schizophrenia, celebrity solipsism and adaptation and forcing them into the claustrophobic confines of a Broadway theatre, a challenge director Alejandro González Iñárritu laughed at and threw in bafflingly well-executed one long continuous take format trickery for good measure, despite people having warned him against it.

Grand Budapest Hotel meanwhile saw Wes Anderson achieve perhaps the best suffusion of his salty sweet idiosyncratic style yet (his pride was clear in the meticulous screening instructions he issued to cinemas), and further down the nominations list Under The Skin and Leviathan also took big risks in terms of production and cinematography with big rewards.

We may still yearn for the Oscars head-to-heads of the 1970s (75's Chinatown vs. The Godfather Part II for instance), but in an increasingly cold-blooded studio system that weighs films like it would stocks, it's reassuring that such wild visions have still found their way onto the big screen – or indeed a multitude of very small ones.