Will Hollywood kill art-house?

The war between David and Goliath has begun and the first skirmish, it seems, has been won by the little guy. Some of Hollywood's leading actors and directors, such as Sean Penn and Martin Scorsese, have managed to overturn, for the time being at least, what has been one of the most controversial studio decisions in years - banning "screeners".

These are DVDs or videos of films hoping to be nominated for coveted awards, such as Oscars, Baftas and Golden Globes, sent out free to voters "for your consideration". Studio bosses are convinced these freebies are one of the biggest weapons criminal gangs have to flood the market with pirate copies.

Film-makers like me, on the other hand, believe they are one of the most potent means of breaking the major studios' stranglehold on movies. And if voters can't see copies of those art-house pictures that only had a limited release, independent film-makers could be mortally wounded.

Imagine Jim Broadbent's mantelpiece had no Oscar for his astonishing performance in Iris, that Halle Berry never wept buckets over winning an Academy Award for Monster's Ball.

That's the sort of bleak future facing cinema if voters can't get to see those films that lack massive marketing budgets. As one of Bafta's 4,000 members, I was looking forward to a bumper crop before Christmas. What would I get to watch from my armchair? Samantha Morton in In America, or maybe Ben Kingsley in House of Sand and Fog?

Nope. I'm getting zilch and I'm livid. But my anger is tempered by the fear that if the ban is enforced it could lead to a catastrophic decline in revenues for British films and an exodus of homegrown talent to the major US studios.

Screeners are the principal reason lowbudget movies have so successfully challenged studio blockbusters for awards over the past decade, and a shot at awards glory is the lifeblood of the arthouse movie - box-office takings for The Pianist and The Hours surged with their Oscar nominations. But it's not just about money. No exposure means we can probably kiss goodbye to some of Britain's brightest Oscar hopes this year, like Morton, or Ewan McGregor and Albert Finney in Tim Burton's Big Fish

Kiss goodbye to awards and you kiss goodbye to the stars. Without them, there'll be no finance and many smaller, artier movies won't get made at all. We'll be left with Hollywood blockbusters ... and precious little else.

Academy president Jack Valenti insists the ban is a stand against piracy. It costs Hollywood billions of dollars in lost revenue. But you don't need to be very bright to realise that while criminals may salivate over getting copies of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, they won't be fighting over Oscar frontrunner American Splendor, a biography/documentary starring Paul Giamatti as a comic-book artist.

The "ban the ban" protesters smell a conspiracy, a blatant attack by the Hollywood studios on the art-house films that steal the limelight.