This is our education minister showing off his cooking skills. Zalzett mir-roża u fixxfinkers. Out of the packet, on to a barbecue big enough to cook him and on to the plate. There’s nothing wrong with a quick meal of overcooked ultra-processed food out of shiny packets once in a while. But to show it off on your insta feed? Is this really the best you can do?

I’m not above guilty pleasures. God knows I indulge in them more than I should. But if you make those guilty pleasures the height of your experience you learn nothing. You’re as stupid as Owen Bonnici looks.

Consider our weird Valletta cultural agency. It has elbowed out the annual Film Festival that used to depend for a vital 30% of its expenses on state finance. The state withdrew that finance and is now paying 100% of the costs to cover Jason Micallef’s idea of a movie night out.

The full program of this year’s film festival consists of Jurassic World, World War Z, The Greatest Showman, Captain Philips and 13 Hours. Five unremarkable multiplex movies from the last decade with no specific connection to Valletta, to Malta, to Europe even. If you don’t count the fact that some scenes shot at Ta’ Liesse for the Brad Pitt vehicle doubled for the West Bank.

I don’t mind saying I watched 3 of those movies. I don’t mind saying I enjoyed them. I watched them in the cinema, or on DVD, or on Netflix. They’re readily available for repeat viewings. That means that anyone who wanted to, could have watched those movies without the patronising help of Jason Micallef. Does anyone mind telling me why I should need the government to spend my money to show me any of this again?

And even if I avoid the debate on whether these films are culture at all, I can definitely make the claim that their ready availability, their marketing budgets and their disposable packaging drown out the artistic efforts of films more people could see if they had screens that would show them.

For that is the purpose of film festivals: exposure to original ideas, artistic endeavours, different takes on telling stories with pictures. Or at least exposure to genres that don’t usually make it to Screen 11 in your downtown multiplex: documentaries, films in other languages, older movies thought lost or mostly forgotten, local talent and limited interest movies such as LGBTI or protest cinema. The list of possibilities is infinite but the common thread is that ‘they’re not for everyone’.

That’s the whole point. This is not elitism. Limited interest is not a class matter. What is elitist is to assume that “the masses” (to keep to Marxist jargon) will only be interested in mainstream Californian drivel and would not be interested in something a bit more challenging or engaging.

As with all politics, populist cultural policy-making treats people like sheep, assumes they’re stupid and feeds them breaded fingers because the working theory is they would not have the sophistication of sifting out the bones to eat a proper fish.

The state need not, should not, intervene in areas that can fend for themselves. Like most people, I will watch yet another Hollywood action star-vehicle blockbuster without needing any tax payers’ money to help me. It’s the pink sausage equivalent of the visual arts. So, if the government is going to step in, it should be to prop up something that would not make it to the screen unless the government spent money on it.

There’s the famous line by Justice Potter Stewart who was trying, timidly, to define pornography in a court decision in 1964: “I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced (as obscenity) but I know it when I see it.”

I will not attempt to define appropriate content for a state-funded cinema program, but I know it’s not Jurassic World.

And I know that if you’re going to show off your BBQ skills with sausages you’ve got to, as a minimum, chop those babies up and toss them with some gooey kusksu.