Critical week: Oscar spreads the love

Oscar voters scattered awards around among the year's top films last night, leaving smiles on the winners' faces and confounding those who tried to predict how it would all go. I only guessed 15 of 24 awards, which wasn't too bad on a night like this. As expected Daniel Day-Lewis, Jennifer Lawrence and Anne Hathaway took Actor, Actress and Supporting Actress, with the night's trickiest major category, Supporting Actor, going to Christoph Waltz. When the dust settled, Ang Lee walked off with Director, while Ben Affleck and George Clooney also added Oscars to their mantlepiece as producers of Best Picture Argo. The film's entire team took to the stage to celebrate.

Seth MacFarlane hosted the event and had some good lines, although his opening sequence was more than a little chaotic, with the spectral appearance of Captain Kirk William Shatner and a couple of song and dance numbers (he's centre top-right with Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Daniel Radcliffe), including a rather amusing misogynistic ditty called We Saw Your Boobs. Looking nervous, he peppered the show with a wide variety of gags, which continued through the night, sometimes funny, sometimes eliciting shocked gasps (a John Wilkes Booth joke) and sometimes taking a little too long to get to the punchline (a hilariously absurd Sound of Music gag).

Music dominated the ceremony, which was a nice change from recent all-business years. Three Oscared musicals from the past 10 years - Chicago, Dreamgirls and Les Miserables - recreated big moments on-stage, but the most memorable numbers were performed by Shirley Bassey (Goldfinger in the Bond tribute), Barbra Streisand (The Way We Were in the In Memoriam sequence) and Adele (middle-right) belting her soon-to-win Bond theme Skyfall.

Best and worst dressed were Jessica Chastain and Naomi Watts, respectively (bottom-right). Daniel Day Lewis' delivered by far the best acceptance speech - let him host next year! And memorable moments included Jennifer Lawrence stumbling up the steps in her massive dress, the insane pairing of Charlize Theron and Dustin Hoffman to hand out the screenwriting awards, a shambolic appearance by most of The Avengers, and Michelle Obama joining Jack Nicholson by video link to present Best Picture.

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CRITICAL WEEK: 
It's been a busy week here in London, as we caught up with a few big-name titles, including Steven Soderbergh's Side Effects, which pleasantly surprised us by shifting from a pharmaceutical drama into a trashy thriller as it went along. Jason Statham and Jennifer Lopez brought their distinctly enjoyable personas to the blunt action thriller Parker, Richard Gere had a chance to shine as a beleaguered banker in Arbitrage, and Dominic Cooper and Dan Stevens fought over Emily Browning in the true period drama Summer in February. And I also caught up with the fifth Oscar-nominated doc How to Survive a Plague just before the ceremony on Sunday. It's a serious stunner - essential viewing.

We also had the launch event for the British Film Institute's 27th London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, which was a terrific party as always. I've been catching up with some of the films in advance of the festival 14-24 March, including the hugely entertaining opening night documentary I Am Divine, the engaging closing night Canadian comedy-drama Margarita, the American romance I Do, the Korean odyssey White Night and Joy! Portrait of a Nun, a freeform doc about one of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.

Coming this week: Ryan Gosling and Bradley Cooper in The Place Beyond the Pines, James Franco and Mila Kunis in Oz the Great and Powerful, Josh Duhamel and Rosario Dawson in Fire With Fire, the Icelandic shipwreck thriller The Deep and the French biopic Renoir. Plus several more LLGFF titles.

Oscar night: out on a limb

Here are my hopes and expectations for the big ceremony on Sunday in Los Angeles. For the first time in about four years, I'll be in London watching through the night - the ceremony runs roughly from 2am to 6am, with Best Picture awarded just as the sun is coming up.

This year's awards race has been the strangest in ages, with no runaway favourite. Most but not all of the categories have someone who is odds-on to win (Supporting Actor is the hardest to predict), but Oscar voters have a way of confounding expectations. So as always I'm cheering for upsets...

P I C T U R E
Will win: Argo
Should/could win: Life of Pi
Also quite possible: Lincoln
Dark horse: Silver Linings Playbook

D I R E C T O R
Will/should win: Ang Lee
Possible: Steven Spielberg
Dark horse: Michael Haneke

A C T R E S S
Will/should win: Jennifer Lawrence
Very possible: Emmanuelle Riva
Dark horse: Jessica Chastain

A C T O R
Will/should win: Daniel Day-Lewis
Possible: Hugh Jackman
Dark horse: Bradley Cooper

S U P P O R T I N G    A C T R E S S
Will/should win: Anne Hathaway
Possible: Sally Field

S U P P O R T I N G    A C T O R
Will/should win: Alan Arkin
Very possible: Tommy Lee Jones or Christoph Waltz
Dark horse: Robert De Niro

O R I G I N A L    S C R E E N P L A Y
Will/should win: Django Unchained
Possible: Zero Dark Thirty
Dark horse: Amour

A D A P T E D    S C R E E N P L A Y
Will win: Argo
Should/could win: Lincoln
Dark horses: Life of Pi or Silver Linings Playbook

F O R E I G N    F I L M
Will/should win: Amour
Dark horse: A Royal Affair
(NB. I haven't seen War Witch or Kon-Tiki in this category)

D O C U M E N T A R Y
Will win: Searching for Sugar Man
Should/could win: How to Survive a Plague
Dark horse: The Gatekeepers

A N I M A T E D   F E A T U R E
Will/should win: Frankenweenie
Very possible: Wreck-it Ralph
Dark horses: Brave or ParaNorman

Critical Week: Smash it up

Press screenings for London critics this past week included Disney's energetic new animated comedy-adventure Wreck-it Ralph, which is already out in the US but won't open here until February. We also finally caught up with Chris Smith's astute Indian drama The Pool, which inexplicably took six years to reach UK cinemas; the hugely engaging Canadian comedy-drama Starbuck; the involving Oscar-nominated Belgian drama Bullhead (starring Rust & Bone's Matthias Schoenaerts); the hilarious micro-budget sci-fi comedy pastiche Codependent Lesbian Space Alien Seeks Same; and the dense and creepy Japanese horror X Game. And I actually bought a ticket to see Breaking Dawn: Part 2 at midnight last Thursday with a cinema full of teenagers and middle-aged women. The film is utterly bonkers - and more fun than the other four parts of the franchise put together.

As for awards-consideration screenings, we had Judd Apatow's hilarious extended sitcom This Is 40, starring the wonderful Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann; Daniel Day-Lewis' measured and astute performance in Steven Spielberg's epic political argument Lincoln; and Matt Damon's reunion with Good Will Hunting director Gus Van Sant for the beautifully assembled Promised Land.

This coming week, the screening schedule is still in flux. In the diary already are: Clint Eastwood in Trouble With the Curve, the acclaimed British indie Broken, the Muslim stand-up comedy drama Material, the school bullying doc Bully, and the indie Christmas comedy Walk a Mile in My Pradas.