Earlier this week, Britain scored a major cultural triumph. We really put those Yanks in the shade. But don't take my word for it. Consider the Sun's splash headline "Brits Cained 'Em!" Or the Daily Mail's "All Things Brit and Beautiful". Or the London Evening Standard's "Brits Storm the Oscars", a headline supported with a photograph of Brit Michael Caine and American Kevin Spacey waving statuettes.

But the patriotic hoopla didn't end there. In the Commons, Tom Clarke served up a nice fat lob for the film minister to smash away. "Does my honourable friend agree that she should be beaming with pride at last night's brilliant British successes in the Oscars?" Unsurprisingly, film minister Janet Anderson did agree. "We have a pool of excellent skills and talent here, and it is no wonder that more and more people want to make their films in Britain."

But the truth behind this misplaced flag-waving is that the Brits did not storm the Oscars. Oscar night was for the most part an evening of American triumphs in which a few token Brits got dragged along on the US's coattails, as happens year after year. The Cider House Rules, in which Michael Caine plays an abortionist, is based on an American novel, directed by an American, and produced in the US with mostly American actors. American Beauty, though winningly directed by a Briton, was written by an American, starred a cast of marvellous mostly American actors, and was produced with US money. Moreover, the film's central theme - the spiritual rebirth of a suburban man and wife in Nowheresville, USA - was surely tailored to US sensibilities.

Patriots will reply that there were some genuinely British triumphs at the Academy Awards. It is true that a British film won the best documentary award, but this is, for good or ill, a marginal Oscar. It is also true that Phil Collins won an award for best song, but when a mawkish tune for a Disney movie becomes an example of a nation's cultural renaissance, it's time to put the Union Jacks back in mothballs.

In the Commons, Anderson pointed to another supposed triumph: Mike Leigh's Gilbert and Sullivan film Topsy-Turvy won two minor awards. But this is an example of Hollywood marginalising British culture. Oscars get dished out to British films mostly when they are costume dramas that support the heritage industry. No British films about the way we live now, depicting our lives in ways we might recognise, were honoured at the Academy Awards. Nor will they be: the US doesn't understand, nor care much about, modern Britain.

Since 1990, British films, actors and film-makers have won 21% of all the major Oscars and 18% of all the major prizes at Cannes. These are not extraordinary figures for a small developed nation that has an entrée into the vast US film production market because of the simple fact that its citizens speak English. But year after year, with mounting desperation and declining plausibility, papers and the government cite the Oscars as a barometer of our cultural achievement.

British films that step outside heritage movie-making hardly ever get nominated. Even The Full Monty or Secrets and Lies, both critically and popularly successful abroad, were ignored by the academy. Think of, say, Lynne Ramsey's marvellously humane Ratcatcher, set in the Glasgow slums in the 70s, or Michael Winterbottom's Wonderland, which, for all its failings, strove passionately to depict present-day London in all its seedy glamour, and thus alienated it from being appreciated by Americans. These films, visually and perhaps even in terms of their spoken language, are too intrinsically foreign for the academy to comprehend, let alone reward with statuettes.

When the Hollywood academy looks at Britain, it sees the country with John Major's eyes, the rose-tinted eyes of a nostalgist hankering after the return of a never-never land of warm beer and cricket on village greens, perhaps with a bit of doublet and hose, iambic pentameter and Dickensian sentimentality thrown in for good measure. It does not see Britain in the terms that Tony Blair described this week, a Britain of many communities and a country of several nations.

Here Blair was launching a new patriotism, one that is problematic for the reasons argued by Norman Davies in his recent book, The Isles: the UK is fracturing and our national identity can hardly be expressed in works of art, since we don't have one. That is why so many of the genuinely good British films about this modern country retreat into the shattered communities of a fractured nation- the Glasgow slums, the London underbelly, the Sheffield unemployed.

Today the new Film Council starts its work under the chairmanship of Alan Parker. This body is charged with distributing £150m in grant in aid and lottery funding over three years. The council's brief is to help develop a sustainable UK film industry, which, given the history of lottery funding for British film since 1996, is quite a challenge. Get Real, Babymother, Keep The Aspidistra Fly ing, Downtime, Crimetime - these were some of the dreadful films that lottery punters have supported, and hardly anybody wanted to see. When Parker was appointed to the chair of the British Film Institute three years ago, he reckoned one of the big issues was "whether you can go to your local multiplex and see a British film made by a British film-maker". No amount of Oscar "triumphs" of the kind that took place in California on Sunday night will make that possible.

But what sort of films will Parker's council be funding? More that are terrible whatever your standards? More that win awards for best make-up and show Britain as it never was for American philistines and British conservatives? Films that speak only to tiny demographics? Or maybe he should just plough the money into Hollywood, and thus help facilitate the annual farce by means of which Britons get a fix of misplaced patriotic sentiment.

Perhaps, instead, Parker might achieve something far more difficult and desirable: to help us to see on screen a Britain that is something more than a 51st state, to make us watch something less nostalgic than another busts-and-bustles costume drama, and, most difficult of all, to encourage us to see something that shows that Britain is not splintering into small groups that are hardly on speaking terms. Then we might have something to celebrate.