My verdict on the Oscars line-up

Last Sunday in LA, we went to the cinema, where I’ve hardly been since Covid. I wasn’t expecting much from the film, as truly enjoyable and entertaining films have been thin on the ground recently. Regardless, I’ve always loved the whole experience of cinema-going, from handing over the tickets and finding your seat to the anticipation of watching the forthcoming attractions. But the trailers shown this time were mostly science-fiction – futuristic, computer-generated pot-boilers – and even though none of them probably cost less than £50 million, the previews left me cold… and deaf. I had to stuff tissue in my ears to muffle the booms and bangs. Ah, for those halcyon days when I was a child, watching exciting trailers for next week’s picture starring Gene Kelly (dancing beautifully) or Danny Kaye (singing hysterically) or a constellation of stars more jam-packed than heaven. Hollywood manufactured dreams then.

As for today’s Oscar-nominated films, they are generally bleak, confusing and interminable. Although there is much trumpeting about how inspiring and brilliant these films are by critics and trade papers such as Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, the consensus from conversations with people I know and respect is that they are unwatchable. They cut back and forth between scenes, overuse flashbacks (eight weeks back, two weeks forward, three years back…) and light them so poorly that all you can see is a dark screen as you strain to hear the dialogue over the soundtrack.

The public seem to be fighting back by simply not going to the movies nearly as much – attendance is way down. Take Babylon, the much-heralded drama about decadent 1920s Hollywood (nominated for three Academy Awards), which has taken a measly $15 million after costing $160 million to make. Another Oscar contender is Everything, Everywhere, All At Once. When we tried to watch it at home, we had to turn on the subtitles as the accented English was so difficult to understand, but since the dialogue switched between Mandarin and English, the English subtitles during the Mandarin exchanges were hidden by a large banner announcing that the actors were ‘SPEAKING MANDARIN’.