http://film.guardian.co.uk/features/featurepages/0,,2018542,00.html
Why the best actors are British
With UK stars threatening to storm the Oscars, American writer Charles McNulty explains why his country's actors can't compete
Thursday February 22, 2007 The Guardian
[WS:] He is right on the target. I would go even further and say that this is the difference between the essentially emotional, epiphenomenal, and anti-intellectual American culture and the more reflective and introspective European one.
This is of course not to imply that all American cinematography consists of shallow cliff hangers and tear jerkers, albeit a great deal of it does. Of the top of my head I can think of a handful truly superb world class films produced here: e.g. Alexander Payne's _About Schmidt_ Jim Jarmusch's _Dead Man_, Todd Haynes's _Far from Heaven_, Sofia Coppola's _Lost in Translation_ or Godfrey Reggio's _Koyaanisqatsi_. But there is something to be said about the propensity of the American culture to be overly emotional, in-your-face evocative, and shying away from philosophy and introspection.
By contrast, Europeans, but especially British tend to have the right balance between the emotional and the intellectual/introspective. For that matter, Russians tend to go to much into social/philosophical while abandoning the personal/emotional. Sometimes it works quite well cf. Mikhail's Kalatozishvili's _I'm Cuba_ which is an interesting attempt to cast a country as the protagonists and personal stories of people as a background for that protagonist, a Hollywood narrative in reverse, so to speak, not to mention Sergei Eisenstein's classic _Battleship Potemkin_. However, more often than not it falls into formulaic and unconvincing didacticism.
Wojtek