What they have come here for is the food.”"Sort of like a booze cruise,” said Susan.”Yes, except it’s fruit and berries they’re after. Let loose a fieldfare on a holly bush, and you’ve got one happy and contented little fieldfare. Look, there are two of them up there.”And he pointed to what looked a bit like a couple of pink-breasted thrushes sitting in the bare branches of adjacent trees, making a noisy racket at each other.”Not unlike manic starlings to listen to,” said Uncle Geoffrey. They get out before the cold weather hits – they almost seem to know instinctively that a cold snap is coming – so when you see the fieldfares arrive, it’s a good sign that snow is coming by and by. “It very seldom snows in England, especially in these days of warmer climates. Scotland gets much more snow than we do, but it always has done.

Snow in England is so rare that if someone asks me whether it is likely to snow, I always say no. And I am usually right.”Robert stole a glance at his sister, Susan, as if to say that the old boy was talking more sense than usual, but decided to challenge him anyway.”Ah, but how could you tell from natural signs that snow is on its way?”"Well, one way is to spot the arrival of the migrant birds from Scandinavia. Hello, children! Time for another stroll in the country with nature expert Uncle Geoffrey, as he takes his nephew and niece, Susan and Robert, through the wintry English lanes.
“Think it will snow today, Uncle Geoffrey?” asked Susan.Uncle Geoffrey looked at the cold grey sky Then he licked his finger and held it up Then he sniffed deeply.”No,” he said. “I think it is most unlikely.”Susan was impressed.”How can you tell that from just licking your finger?” she said.”Oh, I can’t,” he said. “I just happened to notice, as you spoke, that I had a smear of Bovril left over on my finger from breakfast, and I didn’t want to waste it.”"Then why do you think it is most unlikely that it will snow?” said Robert.”That’s because of the law of averages,” said Uncle Geoffrey. When the winning producer came up and said, “Sorry, I really think you should have got it,” I snapped back, “so do I.”In the circumstances Messrs Moore and Gibson do deserve a little better, but I’m sure that if the Brits triumph on 27 February and Vera Drake scoops an Oscar, we’ll conveniently forget about the unfairness of the system, and bask in a collective moment of patriotism
More from Janet Street-Porter. Once again, The Passion of the Christ and Fahrenheit 9/11 are nowhere in the best film category.Even more irritatingly, there’s the Best Film and the Best British Film, as if we poor Brits have to be helped along by including a category we know we can win.

Unsurprisingly, Vera Drake is up for both awards, making a mockery of the phoney division. And in a time of tax concessions, foreign investors and so on, what makes a British film? More than ever, it would seem to be good luck. Mike Leigh has always had loyal foreign investors and Gordon Brown’s unhelpful cutting of the tax incentives for film-makers meant a 40 per cent drop in the number of films made in Britain last year.I’ve long regarded all awards ceremonies as deeply suspect. I’d never have got through on a vote with that membership! And when the TV opera I produced for the BBC was runner-up to Dudley Moore’s dreary series about the orchestra at the Emmies in New York, I’m afraid I showed myself to be an appalling loser. The only time I ever won a Bafta occurred because the category was in the gift of the executive as a “special” – for creative achievement. With only 4,000 members, it is strongly biased towards the BBC and the middle classes.

There are three rounds of voting, when films are whittled down to 15 , then five and then the final winner.Now it includes films that haven’t even been released in Britain yet, which are sent out by their producers and distributors on DVDs or specially screened – both expensive. It costs £195 a year to belong to Bafta unless you live more than 60 miles from its headquarters in Piccadilly. To date The Passion of the Christ, a film which Hollywood refused to invest in or distribute, is a massive international success, grossing £322m worldwide.Likewise shunned by Hollywood until Harvey Weinstein came to his aid, Michael Moore used his website to entreat people to vote for Fahrenheit 9/11. Then leading Republicans took whole-page ads in USA Today and Variety denouncing the film and ensuring that many Academy members would not rock the boat. The bottom line is that the Academy, like the movie star who is governor of its home state, is firmly Republican. And a movie which many of the Jewish faith find distasteful was never going to play well among those who run Hollywood, where Jewish men are in the majority.In Britain, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards have been moved forward to 12 February, becoming part of the big Oscar build-up, which started with the Golden Globes – another weirdly small group of insiders (the Hollywood Foreign Press Association) who wield enormous influence over the film industry Voting for a Bafta award is just as arcane. But then an astonishing 21 million votes were cast on-line to arrive at the winners.Mel Gibson’s film company Icon has spent very little money promoting or advertising his film, although he did send out DVDs to Academy members and put on special screenings for churches and religious groups.

But scratch below the surface and it’s apparent that the Academy and it’s members only want a certain kind of movie and a certain kind of star to shine forth on their night of nights.Fascinatingly, two of the most popular films in the world in the last year appear nowhere in the Oscar nominations: Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. Earlier this month, however, at the 31st Annual People’s choice awards in Pasadena, California, this unlikely twosome struck gold. Gibson’s film was judged best drama and Moore’s best film overall. The nominations for these awards are not quite as democratic as they sound – a panel chosen by editors at Entertainment Weekly magazine selects the long-list of nominees.