Top 10 movies that deserve a tech Oscar

2. The Matrix

The film that spawned a thousand bullet-motion "fights" in pubs across the land, The Matrix was - if we ignore the bloated and bizarre follow-ups in the trilogy - a spectacular piece of cinema that answered that eternal question, "what if this is just a dream?"

The film answered this in a very literal way by saying, "Yes it is all a dream and your world is nothing more than a computer-generated simulation".

While this was a terrifying notion and showed human beings as nothing more than batteries unaware of their peril, if you did realise it, you could see the code world prison in which you were being kept and bend it to your will to do cool slow-motion kung-fu and dodge bullets. Deep.

Eventually, as always, the spirit of humanity won out and the machines were defeated - we think (it was a confusing film) - but to be honest, come the end of the trilogy the film had got lodged so far up its own algorithm, it was hard to care.

But the first Matrix film was a ground-breaking piece of cinema that remains one of those "when did you first see?" classics.

However, one lingering question remains: what would have happened if Neo had taken both the pills at once?

1. Minority Report

Minority Report has to be the best tech movie ever made. Steven Spielberg is reported to have invited 15 experts, including a number of computer scientists and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology architect, to a three-day 'think tank' in 1999 to create a realistic view of the year 2054.

The highly futuristic plot sees police chief John Anderton, played by Tom Cruise, live in a society where the US state can monitor citizens' every move, and the Washington DC police force uses technology to prevent and punish murders before they even happen. People's irises are read while they're on the move and Anderton can manipulate computer data and film footage with his hands.

Many ideas of the film have already become real, like 3D screens and gesture-based computing, which is now used in products like Microsoft Kinect. Retina scanners already existed when the film debuted, but the technology is now commonly used by border control agencies.

Some of the film's other ideas do not seem too far off. We are hopefully far from the state monitoring our every move, but already - through GPS receivers are on most mobile devices - it is possible to detect and track our whereabouts.

Although our transport is yet to be emission free, our cars are not computer controlled (but it is in development) and spider robots - thankfully - do not yet exist, these ideas all have a basis in reality - for good or evil.

In fact, the US military has reportedly contracted BAE systems to develop 'spy-bots' (which look like spider robots) for war zone use, although a date for their first deployment is unknown. Perhaps future military schools will need to test for arachnophobia in their soldiers. µ