So Star Wars is the greatest movie of all time, according to a poll in the new issue of Empire, the glossy monthly self-described on its cover as "The UK's No 1 film magazine". In this poll of the magazine's readers, of whom there are many thousands in Ireland, the Star Wars sequel, The Empire Strikes Back, is voted second, and the top 10 movies also include such long-established classics as The Matrix (fifth), Fight Club (sixth) and Gladiator (seventh), all three of which were released in the past two years.
The best actress of all time, in the view of Empire readers, is Julia Roberts, while Angelina Jolie, in sixth, stands one place ahead of Meryl Streep, and Natalie Portman (astonishingly rated 10th), Sandra Bullock (22nd) and Meg Ryan (23rd) are ranked ahead of Ingrid Bergman (24th), Marilyn Monroe (32nd), Ellen Burstyn (39th), Catherine Deneuve (42nd), Elizabeth Taylor (44th) and Vivien Leigh (49th).
More plausibly, Robert De Niro is voted best actor, but look down the list and there's Harrison Ford in fourth, John Cusack at ninth and Mel Gibson at 16th, while Marlon Brando is a lowly 15th, Cary Grant is down at 19th, Humphrey Bogart is 22nd and Robert Mitchum is 46th.
"The response to this year's poll was amazing," notes Empire editor Emma Cochrane. "We received 1,500 votes from the website alone in the first week. There were sackfuls of postal entries and faxes . . . There were votes from all over the world, and the films and actors that featured came from every decade since cinema dΘbuted."
Yes, but the great majority of the highest placed movies, actors and directors in the poll come from the last quarter of the 20th century, confirming the growing suspicion that a great many younger cinema-goers have no awareness or appreciation of movies from the first 75 years of that century. As if movies began in 1977, with the vastly over-praised, effects-driven fantasy that is Star Wars.
Empire appears to share that view, given its disparaging comments on some of the older movies in the poll. In a note on The Godfather, that ancient epic (from 1972) which ranks fourth in the best movie poll, the anonymous Empire scribe blithely declares: "While many movies of the era now look badly dated, The Godfather is one of those modern classics which stands the test of time".
The only other pre-Star Wars movie to make the top 10 is the charming 1961 Breakfast at Tiffany's, clearly prompted by its high-profile re-release earlier this year, and the acres of coverage generated in the trendy style magazines which belatedly discovered the chicness of Audrey Hepburn, Givenchy and foot-long cigarette-holders.
Search through the rest of the top 30, and the only other pre-Star Wars movies are Jaws (13th), Casablanca (15th), Some Like It Hot (24th), Citizen Kane (28th) and It's a Wonderful Life (30th) - four of which made the top 10 when Irish Times readers voted in a 1995 poll to mark the first centenary of cinema. How the mighty have fallen.
There is worse to follow in the lower reaches of the top 50. Two great epics from the 1960s - 2001: A Space Odyssey (33rd) and Lawrence of Arabia (37th) - come behind Mel Gibson's action yarn Braveheart and Luc Besson's all-flash-and-no-substance US thriller Leon. And the third Star Wars movie, Return of the Jedi, is placed 40th, ahead of Singin' in the Rain (41st) and The Searchers (44th).
While the Empire readers voted Robert De Niro best actor, they showed much less respect for his two most celebrated performances - in Taxi Driver (ranked 37th) and Raging Bull (42nd). And while Alfred Hitchcock is rated third among the best directors by Empire readers, his only movies on the top 50 are down at the bottom - Rear Window (47th) and Vertigo (50th).
It goes without saying that there is not one foreign-language film on the entire top 50, although the best director list includes a few token nods to Akira Kurosawa (29th), Sergio Leone (34th) and Franτois Truffaut (47th), who just scrapes in ahead of Die Hard director John McTiernan, Pearl Harbor director Michael Bay and Lock, Stock director Guy Ritchie, at the bottom of the pile.
Among the many renowned directors omitted in the Empire top 50 are Bergman, Fellini, Bu±uel, Eisenstein, Ozu, Visconti, Lean, Pasolini, Antonioni, Polanski, Kieslowski, Bertolucci, Fassbinder, Mankiewicz, Cukor, Renoir, Altman, Lumet, Cassavetes, Peckinpah, Sirk, Wyler, Kazan, Zinnemann, Berkeley, Chaplin, Keaton, Curtiz and Capra.
Steven Spielberg tops the poll for best director, followed by Scorsese, Hitchcock, Tim Burton, Kubrick, Ridley Scott, David Fincher, George Lucas, James Cameron and Joel Coen. There are many moot selections there - principally Star Wars deviser Lucas and the wildly uneven Scott, while Fincher has only made four features to date. But look who's ranked in 19th place, none other than Kevin Smith, director of Clerks, Dogma and the imminent Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
The Empire note on Smith reads: "Pop culture-soaked slacker, renowned for superb dialogue, riffs on Star Wars and staid visual style". Clearly, there is no escaping the genius of Star Wars and its overwhelming cultural influence.
And the New Zealand director Peter Jackson is ranked 23rd - not, I suspect, for his work on Heavenly Creatures or The Frighteners, but because he is responsible for the most eagerly awaited and heavily hyped movie event of the early 21st century: his trilogy based on The Lord of the Rings. Such is the level of anticipation that over 100 Empire readers voted for the first film in the series, The Fellowship of the Ring, as the best movie of all time - even though nobody has seen it and it won't be released until December 19th. No kidding! There is such an askew emphasis in the poll on movies from the very recent past - and even movies not yet released - that it's almost surprising to find no mention of summer 2001 box-office smashes such as The Mummy Returns, Rush Hour 2 and American Pie 2,
What the Empire poll reflects is what is fed to its readers on a monthly basis: a relentless diet of breathless hype for the most mainstream Hollywood cinema, spiced up with coverage of some of the trendier US indies. The past is a different country, and the only older movies to figure in the magazine are found buried deep down the DVD reviews.
To be fair, the agenda of Empire is upfront, and it makes no pretence at taking on a broader brief that might encourage its readers to seek out the classics of world cinema. I was once at a conference of European critics and distributors when the then editor of Empire declared that they would never put a non-American star on the cover. They had done it once with an English actor, he said, and afterwards sales were significantly down.
Furthermore, the Empire poll ought to be seen in its broader context, at a time when classic and foreign-language movies are almost invariably dumped in the post-midnight graveyard by television outlets - BBC 2, Channel 4, Network 2 - which not so very long ago would have featured them in much more accessible and high-profile slots.
For a very different result, look out for next year's Sight & Sound poll of international critics, which is conducted every 10 years. When the magazine's last poll was conducted in 1992, there was a good deal of criticism because there were so few recent movies on the list - the newest on the top 10 being 2001: A Space Odyssey, released 24 years earlier, and the next most recent production was The Searchers, released a further 10 years earlier than that.
In 1992, Sight & Sound published in full the individual lists of the 129 critics (myself included) who replied to their poll. Scanning through all those lists again this week, I counted not a single vote for Star Wars. And that's most unlikely to change when the poll is held again next year.