Cannes is like no other festival. It hosts the most important arthouse competition in the world, yet it is utterly fixated by power and stars. Every year the fabulously rich park their floating skyscrapers on the horizon, and 10,000 journalists squirt up and down the Croisette like eels on heat. Bars and cafés are turned into informal trading posts. At 11pm on the terrace of the Grand Hotel the lowdown on Jack Nicholson’s new squeeze can be swapped for a pair of tickets to the Ocean’s 13 party.

Bets are wagered on the latest hot tip for the Palme d’Or. And around the corner hundreds of young film-makers and actors congregate all night outside the Petit Majestic bar, pitching their unacclaimed masterpieces to tipsy journalists and producers.

It’s a sapping marathon. Fighting your way into press screenings at 8.30 in the morning can be as tough as crashing parties at midnight. The security in Cannes is ruthless. There is a hierarchy of press badges of which the most highly prized is the Presse Soirée – a white card that gives the wearer access to sought-after events and the right to skip to the front of almost every queue. I’ve learnt to use mine like a rapier.

But even this card is no guarantee if the competition films are hot, and the 60th anniversary edition of the festival has all the makings of an absolute classic. For what seems like the first time in years there will be no popcorn blockbuster around which the other movies will circulate. No Star Warsor Da Vinci Code. The closest to a glittery bauble is Ocean’s 13, but that has a style and brains of its own.

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Not that the festival’s artistic director, Thierry Frémaux, has stinted on seasoned crowd-pleasers. Joel and Ethan Coen are perennial Cannes favourites whose latest offering, No Country for Old Men, features Tommy Lee Jones, Kelly Macdonald and Javier Bardem in a murderous thriller set near the Rio Grande. Quentin Tarantino’s “grindhouse” experiment, Death Proof, is presented complete with its “missing” reel. And Gus Van Sant’s drama, Paranoid Park, begins with the accidental killing of a security guard. What unites these auteurs, apart from nationality, is that they have already won the Palme d’Or.

The other Americans in competition include David Fincher, who makes his Cannes debut with Zodiac. And James Gray pitches into the competition with We Own the Night, a thriller about the Russian mafia in New York starring Joaquin Phoenix and Mark Wahlberg. I have never seen a more eloquent vote of confidence in the health of American cinema at a European festival.

It is a seminal moment in Cannes history. The unstable relationship between Hollywood and the biggest film festival in the world has been the dominant issue in Cannes since the coming and going of the nouvelle vague. Recent editions of the festival have revealed troubling cracks. Publicly they love each other to bits. American pictures and American stars are part and parcel of the annual Riviera magic. Indeed, Hollywood glamour defines the popular perception of Cannes as a parade of celebrity.

This “special friendship” gives Cannes a leading edge over every other festival. Cannes has an unmatched ability to sift out new masterpieces and exciting new talent. Hollywood reciprocates by shipping in the glitter. The paparazzi swarm like flies, and the rest of the planet watches the two-week orgy with an understandable mixture of envy and amusement.

But unease has sharpened in recent summers about this lopsided marriage of convenience. The appetite for huge studio “event” movies – basically to show off the awesome pulling power of the festival – has bent the official competition out of shape. The world premiere of The Da Vinci Codesucked the oxygen out of last year’s scrap for the Palme d’Or, the Oscars of thinking cinema. The year before, the show was stolen by the final chapter of the George Lucas franchise, Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith.

You can’t overestimate the extraordinary hype and expectation that accompanies these white elephants. They trample interest in the competition proper, and they look grotesquely out of place. From a commercial point of view it seems sheer lunacy to open your tent-pole block-buster in front of the world’s most cranky critics at an arthouse festival. But the studios know that these films are mostly bullet-proof, and that Cannes is a fabulously convenient place to launch product into Europe.

More damage is inflicted when the 22 films officially selected for competition are struggling to impress – which they have been for several festivals. In these circumstances the town can become a hollow and cynical place. The market remains as robust and bewildering as ever, but confidence leaks out of the festival proper. The serious challenge facing Frémaux is to restore faith in Cannes’ traditional boast that it fields the best art films by restoring faith in his competition. Commercial “event” movies can no longer be allowed to dwarf the importance of this pilgrimage.

Ironically, the most exciting selections are from Hollywood big beasts. The crucial difference is that there is a genuine indie sensibility about the material and directors that is matched by the strength of contenders from the rest of the world. Wong Kar Wai’s first English-language film, My Blueberry Nights, starring Norah Jones, Jude Law, Rachel Weisz and Natalie Portman, opens the festival proper. The unpredictable Bosnian director Emir Kusturica hopes to win an unprecedented third Palme d’Or with Promise Me This. And the veteran Canadian director Denys Arcand closes the fest on May 27 with The Age of Darkness.

This is also the year when the Sundance generation comes of age. There are high hopes for Harmony Korine’s epic film shot on three continents, Mister Lonely. And Gael GarcÍa Bernal makes his directing debut with Déficit, about a family reunion in Mexico.

There are Out of Competition galas for Michael Winter-bottom’s thriller A Mighty Heart, starring Angelina Jolie, about the murdered Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. And Michael Moore is back with his latest public health warning, Sicko, about the alarming state of America’s health system.

What Frémaux is clearly aiming for is a balance and rigour that has been woefully missing in the programme for too long. There is a refreshing lack of studio froth and nonsense, and a serious new gleam to the competition. This is what Cannes is really about. I haven’t looked forward to it so eagerly for an age.

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