Last week Paul Haggis won the best film Oscar - for the second year in a row. The Academy is in love with him. So is there a formula other film-makers can learn, asks Andrew Pulver.

The Lubitsch touch. The Barton Fink feeling. The Haggis . . . halo? A new Hollywoodism may have to be coined. Because it's now clear that whatever that secret thing is that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences wants, Paul Haggis has it in spades. The director of Crash and before that the writer of Million Dollar Baby, Haggis has won, for himself and his collaborators, a staggering total of seven Oscars with his first two films. He's clearly got something. The question is, can you bottle it and sell it on eBay?

Haggis the man is something of an anomaly. A Canadian in his mid-50s with a long career writing and producing TV shows (including Thirtysomething), there's nothing in his background to predict this achievement. Even the well-publicised car-jacking incident that sparked off his desire to write Crash sounds like the sort of inspiration John Q Hack brings to screenwriting class.

And yet, the stark truth is that Crash and Million Dollar Baby both won accolades for best picture, not just for their star performances. Haggis's achievement is an artistic one. The Academy must just really like his films.

So what have they got? Current wisdom says that, by turning away from Brokeback Mountain, Capote and Good Night, and Good Luck, the Academy is displaying its innate conservatism, backing off from the radical political statement that Oscar commentators have been talking up since the nominations were announced. Crash is an LA film, about LA people and LA neuroses. It has got enough liberal credentials, in that it tries to show how everyone falls victim of and to cultural stereotyping.

It's an easy pill to swallow, and Hollywood swallowed it - helped, of course, by a huge campaign.

That view is true enough on many levels - though to cry foul over heavy marketing is pushing it, especially as every film has been shoving out glossy brochures and taking full-page trade-magazine ads for at least a couple of months. But there's surely something more subtle at work here. The Academy vote is like a political leadership election: they don't always like doing what they're supposed to do.

Both Brokeback and the George Clooney film are self-conscious creations: both want to convert. I don't think it's insignificant that commentators from the gay press have laid into Brokeback Mountain, disliking its apparent acquiescence to repression and homophobia, while critics from right-leaning newspapers have been most impressed by Good Night, and Good Luck, seemingly unaware that McCarthyism has been the barn door-sized bête noire of the global left for decades. There's a strange aroma of I-am-telling-you-something-you-don't-know about both of them.

No such problem with Crash. Even if the central auto-accident device is recognisable from Amores Perros, the provocative attitude from Falling Down, and the careful paralleling of pan-ethnic racism from Do the Right Thing, Haggis's film tells it like it sees it.

There's an honesty of intention that the Academy has picked up on, even if, as a film, it has some of the clunkiest scenes on record. (There's a lot to choose from, but William Fichtner's "what is it with you black people?" line to Don Cheadle is arguably the most idiotic.)

There's also something to be said for putting in the late run. Bill Clinton did it. The last-minute momentum for Crash clearly pushed it over the line. Million Dollar Baby pulled off a similar coup a year ago, beating the heavily nominated The Aviator in every category they were paired up for. (Scorsese, if you like, is the anti-Haggis - what he's got, the Academy doesn't want. Never has.)

Million Dollar Baby, on the surface, is a slightly different proposition from Crash. For a start, it had Clint Eastwood, of whom the Academy is rather fond. (He has won best director three times. Scorsese never has.)

It's also, in the opinion of this critic at least, a much better film than Crash - smaller in scale, yet more epic in reach. Like Crash, however, there's no hint of compromise or prevarication - other than what the film-makers deem necessary to tell their story.

While Haggis is comforting himself that he has unlocked Hollywood's secrets, it's instructive to compare his career trajectory with that of another, near-identical figure, to see how the merest wobble can make a big difference.

Like Haggis, Stephen Gaghan was an acclaimed neophyte scriptwriter (he won an Oscar in 2001 for his screenplay for Traffic), and possessed much Hollywood kudos for dabbling in "difficult" social topics.

Like Haggis, Gaghan then stepped up to the big league, by writing and directing Syriana for Clooney. But Syriana, though Oscar-worthy in a broad way, has, in the micro-shadings of what's deemed too radical by the Academy, fallen on the wrong side of the line. Gaghan lost out to Haggis in the screenplay category, and wasn't even nominated as a director.

The fact is, it's hardly likely that Haggis will keep up this strike rate. Like any Hollywooder in such a Midas-touch position, he has taken on a string of producing and scriptwriting assignments. His next writing-and-directing number is called Honeymoon with Harry, about a groom-to-be who has to scatter his fiancée's ashes.

It may be premature to wonder if we shall ever see his like again. But his record so far, though, is extraordinary, and almost demands it.

- Guardian Service