The big thing that's changed is that the cinema was part of the general community. There were the local cinemas, which were often of a modest kind, the high street cinemas, almost all of which have disappeared now, there were the grand cinemas, which were palatial, they're mostly gone now. People went as a kind of routine experience, there wasn't the competition of television, for most people, until the 1950s. People would go as a common exercise, families would go together, movie-going was relatively cheap.

Nowadays, there's just one film shown in separate performances, with trailers that they should pay people to see rather than have people pay to sit through. Back then, they would go and see a double bill, they would have the news on with it. It was connected with the world - there would always be a newsreel from Pathé or Movietone. It was where people saw a bit of the Grand National or the Cup Final, where they saw the coming on, then the process, of the Second World War, and at the end of that, one of the great impacts that the cinema has ever had on a wide audience, was that newsreel in 1945 showing the opening of the extermination camps, particularly of Bergen-Belsen. This had a profound effect on the way people saw the world, indeed, viewed human nature, the human condition, what man was capable of doing.

Also, going to a cinema was a balanced meal in some ways, with a cartoon and newsreel, and one or two feature films, and films of general interest, and often a short documentary, up to 20 minutes or so. So the three things people went to the cinema for - entertainment, art and instruction - were often contained within the same programme.

But on the Oscar issue, there was a figure, Lindsay Anderson - I don't know what influence he has among younger people, if any at all - but as a critic and then as a filmmaker, he had a double impact. He was a moral conscience of serious movie-goers through his writing and the films he made. He came from a Scottish Presbyterian background, and had a very serious idea about movies, but on the other hand his favourite director was John Ford, whom he thought one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, something with which I agree. But he first made documentaries, and he won an Oscar for a film that cost a couple of hundred pounds to make - a 20-minute film about the teaching of deaf children.