The 95th Academy Awards are here at last and beckon the end of yet another staggeringly long awards season. After three turbulent years at the multiplex, dare we say it, this year feels like business as usual may well be back in action.
With a hearty eleven nods to its name, Everything Everywhere All at Once is a hot (dog) favourite to win everything, everywhere all at once – or, rather, over three hours – but has major competition from BAFTA favourites All Quiet on the Western Front and The Banshees of Inisherin.
Only time can tell as to who will actually come out on top but there’s always fun to be had in the pre-match guessing game…
One can only imagine the gallows humour that was banded around the set of Allelujah. The film adapts Alan Bennett’s eponymous play and comes directed by Notes on a Scandal’s Richard Eyre. It creams the upper crop of Britain’s most beloved veteran thespians and devotes just shy of a hundred minutes to reminding each that they’re nearer death than birth. Charming. A good job all involved boast a well honed sense of humour. Certainly, a cast so glittering can’t help but warm the cockles. And yet, an excess of worthy point-making can’t help but weigh down the film’s featherlight flurries.
It’s been well over a decade since Shekhar Kapur last featured on the British cinema scene. That was 2007’s risible Elizabeth sequel: The Golden Age. The less said the better. And yet, feels is fitting that Kapur’s return to the main stage plays rather like a callback to a bygone era. What’s Love Got to do With It? revives not Britain’s love affair with lavish period drama but the lush rom coms Richard Curtis made profitable in the nineties. Curtis hasn’t a hand in this one but with the leafy London setting, middle class sensibilities and über-familiar narrative, he’s the only plummy cliché missing.
The Film Blog 