It's so easy to forget who's in and who's out in the arts

Watching the Queen do the rounds of the cultural establishment at the Royal Academy party to celebrate the arts on Wednesday, I rather warmed to her forgetfulness. Mick Hucknall, to his chagrin, was unsurprisingly not recognised by the Queen. Nor, I gather, was Joanna Lumley. It was amusing to see the Queen's escorts taking no chances after this when introducing guests to her. "This is Beryl Bainbridge, the writer," she was informed. "Ah, the writers ..." said the Queen, enigmatically.

What did she mean? God bless the nation's writers? Spare me from the writers? The glory of her little epigrams is that we rarely know what she means. When we do, though, it can be enlightening. One luminary told me how he remarked to the Queen that her son, the Prince of Wales, was the patron of his organisation. "Is he interested in the arts?" asked Her Majesty. Was that a naive query about one's own flesh and blood, or a devastatingly ironic aside? There can only be one answer.

Personally, I couldn't blame her for not recognising people. The trouble with members of the cultural establishment is that they go in and out of fashion and take lengthy breaks between their bursts of creative output (don't you, Mick). I spent half the evening trying to guess the identity of a diminutive, attractive and heavily made up woman wandering around nervously on her own. But then it's been a while since Kate Bush was on Top of the Pops.

Aside from seeing who is currently reckoned to be in the cultural establishment (the rise of Pete Waterman continues), the evening was notable for the Queen dipping into her own pocket to help with bursary awards for young arts practitioners. No one would say how much she had actually given, which was odd; but I found the gesture itself even odder. Why should the Queen put money towards the awards? There are plenty of sponsors around for such a glamorous and well-publicised event. It's a strange precedent. Presumably it was meant to show she cares about young artists. But by that logic she can expect to be bombarded with letters from drama school students for help with their grants.

Perhaps there is no logic to these jamborees. David Gordon, the secretary of the Royal Academy, told me that more people would become interested in the arts once they saw that the Queen was celebrating them. I'm not sure the country really thinks like that. If it did, we'd all follow a night at the opera with a day at the races.

*While still at the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday, I was struck by a bizarre development with implications for both cinema and for devolution. Ken Loach's new film, Sweet Sixteen, about the lives of a group of young people in Greenock, near Glasgow, had subtitles: not just subtitles into French but subtitles into English.

Loach defended this, saying that those attending the festival from the Far East and even America would have great difficulty with the strong dialect. Fair enough. He was then asked if he would be using subtitles when the film was shown in England. He replied, to my astonishment, that it was possible. He was keeping "an open mind".

I have to confess I did find myself using the subtitles when I watched the film in Cannes. But with a little effort one could have become used to the dialect quite easily. And if Loach does subtitle the film in England, where will it end? Why not subtitle the American-Irish accents in the forthcoming Martin Scorsese film, Gangs Of New York? Leonardo DiCaprio could certainly use some subtitles, since his accent ranges over several Irish counties in the course of a single sentence.

Perhaps Loach, the most political of film directors, is making a point here. Devolution can truly be said to have taken on a cultural dimension and a dialect given its proper status when Scottish is subtitled into English. Who knows, it may even catch on regionally. We could yet see "Absolutely, yes indeed!" flash up on the television screen when Oz says "Why, aye," in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.

*I spent my most disturbing half hour in Cannes sitting on a hotel rooftop terrace having a chat with Woody Allen.

Allen, who was at the festival with his very funny new movie Hollywood Ending, was saying he wished he had greater religious faith, because that would stop him "waking up terrified" every morning.

What was he terrified of, I asked, as I gazed contentedly over the bay. "Oh, probably the same things as you," he replied, giving me a curious little conspiratorial nudge. "Death, certainly." I began to feel a little queasy. "Loss of loved ones." I started feeling slightly edgy. "Illness." I remembered I hadn't been sleeping well. "Old age." I looked at the boats on the waters below and tried to stop listening to this depressing liturgy, but on and on it went. I left his presence a paid-up neurotic. Allen probably went inside to work on his next comedy script.

d.lister@independent.co.uk