So, that’s it from us. Thanks to all of you out there for reading over the last seven years! It’s been a pleasure and a privilege to share all this with you. Well, mostly.

Jim Eaton-Terry
“I’m finished.”

Mr Moth
“Oh no, it wasn’t the airplanes. It was beauty killed the beast.”

Fiona Pleasance
“I’m afraid you’re right, Mr. Helpmann. He’s gone.”

Kiwizoidberg
“I, the Wrath of God, will marry my own daughter and with her I will found the purest dynasty the world has ever seen. Together, we shall rule this entire continent. We shall endure. I am the Wrath of God! Who else is with me?”

Jake
“Did you hear what I said, Miss Kubelik? I absolutely adore you.”
“Shut up and deal.”

KittyKarate
“But what we found out is that each one of us is a brain… and an athlete… a basket case… a princess… and a criminal. Does that answer your question? Sincerely yours, the Breakfast Club.”

Viv Wilby
“Has he gone?”
“Yes, you missed him this time, but he’ll be coming again.”

Philip Concannon
“Hey old buddy, I’m going to take off.”
“Hey, stick around. Talk awhile.”
“OK.”

Ricky Young
“I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.”

Kate le Vann
“How little you know men, Miss Winslow.”

fogger
“Arrgghhhhh!”

CaulorLime
“One can’t just leave. Please.”
“Be sensible, Martins.”
“Haven’t got a sensible name, Calloway.”

Sarah Slade
“Little girl, it’s a great big world, but there’s only one of… MEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

Jeremy Tiang
“It’s fine, I’m just happy.”
“I’m happy too.”

Ron Swanson
“You’ve been a long way away. Thank you for coming back to me.”

The Belated Birthday Girl
“You met me at a very strange time in my life.”

Matthew Turner
“What?”

James Moar
[As the main characters return to Earth thousands of years after they started a mission to save it, they see these words light up on the Earth surface. They translate as:]
“WELCOME BACꓘ”

Helen Archer
“Your hair, it’s wet. Oh …”

Paul Duane
“Is that all you have to say for him?”
“He was some kind of a man… What does it matter what you say about people?”
“Goodbye, Tanya.”
“Adiós.”

Spank The Monkey
“All right sonny, that’s enough. Just pack that in.”

Welcome to our seventh and – sniff – final live Oscars party, bringing you red carpet and awards news almost as it happens. This year everyone is invited, so dig out your frocks and jewels and have the emergency manicurist on speed-dial as you get ready for the biggest night out of the year, in the company of some genuine Hollywood legends…

It’s Mostly Oscars: The Final Chapter.

Starring

Laura Morgan as Jimmy Kimmel

(Her jokes are hit-and-miss and she’s definitely making most of it up as she goes along!)

With

Ricky Young as Warren Beatty

(He ruined last year’s Oscars for everyone, but they’ve invited him back anyway!)

Featuring

Blake Backlash as Justin Timberlake

(The boyish schtick is getting old and so is he, but that’s not gonna stop him!)

And

Clio as Meryl Streep

(She’d clearly much rather be almost anywhere else!)

But

MarvMarsh as Jack Nicholson

(There’s no earthly reason for him to be here, but we like his OTT reactions and he likes the free booze!)

We’ll be with you through the night as always; fighting amongst ourselves, missing crucial announcements, cheering as our predictions ALL turn out to be right and playing this year’s Oscars Bingo, where we will be drinking a measure of whisky from a crystal tumbler each time we see any of the following:

• An acting nominee with their mum as their date
• A guest wearing the Pantone Color Of The Year (Ultra Violet)
• Ryan Seacrest being visibly snubbed on the red carpet
• Damien Chazelle and Barry Jenkins interviewed together
• Co-nominees, co-parents and former spouses Gary Oldman and Lesley Manville sharing a family moment
• A reference to EnvelopeGate within the first 20s of the opening monologue (double shot if it includes mention of Bonnie and Clyde)
• The Adele Dazim Award for the most impressive mangling of a nominee’s name
• A reference to #TimesUp in an acceptance speech
• A reaction shot  of a male actor attempting to convey solidarity with #TimesUp through sensitive nodding
• A winner thanking their “beautiful blue-eyed wife” (yeah, Jordan Horovitz, we haven’t forgotten)
• The Annual Samuel L. Jackson Memorial Really Bad Loser Award

Join us from 10.30pm, UK-time, as we line up our Oscars-themed feast of cold hard boiled eggs, communion wafers, a mushroom omelette, some ripe peaches, a well-stirred cup of tea, and a cigar.

10:56pm: Good evening! Did we say 10.30? We meant 11pm, so actually we’re a bit early. We’ve been having technical issues at MostlyFilm Towers but we’re up and running (for now) and you join us on the red carpet (we like your nails!), where Ryan Seacrest has not yet been visibly snubbed, but the night is young.

11pm: We have a late addition to the MostlyFilm team in the form of Dangerous Dave (real name), who once worked on a film that nearly won an Oscar. He is a composer and will, in the absence of the much-missed Victor, be advising on the musical categories, although he hasn’t heard any of the songs so will be making that part up as he goes along, very much in the time-worn spirit of MostlyFilm Oscars coverage.

11:07pm: It’s getting crowded on the red carpet, although we haven’t seen anyone we know yet, and two presenters whose names we missed are speaking in a series of platitudes so bland that our collective brains have just fallen out through our ears.

11:09pm: James Ivory (“you’re the oldest man ever nominated for an Oscar!”) is wearing a very cool shirt:

11:15pm: Three of the supporting cast of Three Billboards (Abbie Cornish, Darrell Britt-Gibson and Sandy Martin) are asked what they would put on a billboard. “More dancing!”, says Darrell. OK, Darrell.

To be fair, a question that stupid is fully deserving of an answer that stupid.

“He turned out to be a good boy in the end”, says Ryan to Sandy, who played Sam Rockwell’s mum. Mmhmm.

There’s Christopher Plummer!

11:18pm:  If Seacrest ever gets taken down for being a sex case he’ll have to interview himself.

11.19pm: Allison Janney attempts to convince us that she first heard of Tonya Harding because she was such an accomplished figure skater. Sure, Alison. Us too!

11:21pm: Apparently Sam Rockwell is “known for his dancing”. “He’ll bust a move if he wins”, says a red-carpeteer. “Sam Rockwell is the best dancer I’ve ever seen!” says her co-presenter, getting a little carried away.

11:22pm: Andy Serkis is talking to Ryan Seacrest. He looks different not covered in stickers in preparation for being turned into a goblin. (He is talking about it, though.)

Actually we’re not sure what he’s talking about, but it’s definitely impassioned.

We just assumed it was goblins.

11:25pm: It’s Donald Sutherland!

And Hans Zimmer! Hans Zimmer has a hot date.

11:27pm: Hans Zimmer is very charming, says Dave. “I met him years ago. It was Valentine’s Day and I got very drunk and fell asleep in front of him.” Don’t say we don’t bring you all the top celebrity gossip.

11:29pm: “It was an Oscars to remember” says E! presenter JD, perhaps jumping the gun a little.

11:36pm: Ryan asks Bradley “I would have voted for Obama a third time” Whitfield what connected with him about Get Out. We are willing him to say “Being a massive racist, Ryan”, but his actual answer is more boring and we’ve already forgotten it.

11:39pm: Rita Moreno! Famous for giving a fifteen-second acceptance speech the year she beat Judy Garland to the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. “Is there anything you wish you’d said that night that you want to say tonight?”, asks Ryan. “Oh,” she tells him, “you could be here for a while.”

11:40pm: She’s wearing THE SAME DRESS as she wore in 1962. Hang on, we’ll find pictures.

11:42pm: AMAZE:

11:44pm: Poor Laura Dern. “It’s hard to see on the monitors but she’s looking gorgeous in that white dress,” translates as “she looks a mess for sure but in the flesh she looks good, I promise!”

11:48pm: Mary J. Blige is here! In what we presume is outfit #1 of 2, since she is also performing later. This is a sweeping number, also in bridal white.

11.49pm: “Has Thor Ragnarok been nominated?” says Marv, who’s clearly been preparing for this evening as carefully and extensively as the rest of us. “I was just watching it. It’s great!”

(NB: the answer is No.)

11:51pm: Armie Hammer isn’t here because he has stomach flu, apparently.

11:52pm: What is stomach flu, anyway?

“Army Hammer, Leggy Spanner” says Marv, helpfully.

“I think putting ‘stomach’ in there reminds us that he might puke rather than just sneeze”, says Blake.

“He sneezes out of his sculpted tummy button”, Ricky informs us.

“So arse flu is for the shits?”, asks Marv.

We’re going to leave this one here for now, you guys.

11:53pm: Ad break! Go and make some tea, or, better, something stronger. We’ve got five more hours of this to get through together and frankly, the standard of conversation isn’t going to improve so you’re going to need to find a way to cope.

11:55pm: Ryan is interviewing Mary J. Blige and unusually, he seems to have seen the film she’s nominated for!

(It’s Mudbound you guys, go and watch it as soon as we’re done here.)

11:58pm: And now Ryan’s talking to Common, who these days officially has to be nominated in the Original Song category every year. He has a key-shaped badge on his lapel and we wonder what it means, and whether it’s a political statement that we’re not yet on board with or whether he just wants to be able to get into his hotel room super quickly later.

Or maybe he’s secretly a concierge. It’s a differently-shaped badge, but they probably have splinter groups.

Look, there’s not much going on just now, OK?

12:03am: Salma Hayek is wearing a sort of a tie-dyed thing with chains around the arms. It’s the kind of outfit that some of us might have worn to a festival in the nineties, with DMs.

(We’d have worn it with DMs. Salma isn’t wearing DMs.)

12:05am: Alex Zane Hair Watch: Kind of a mullet?

And Sanjeev Bhaskar on the Sky sofa with him. Man.

12:06am: Alison “You know I can’t give you the key, right babe?” Williams is in off-white. We haven’t seen anyone in a colour yet, although Salma’s dress had purple moments here and there.

12:07am: Why doesn’t Tom Hanks get Oscars any more? He’s just as good as he ever was.

Maybe not as good as he was in Big.

He should do some proper comedy. Change it up a bit. Bachelor Party 2. (Or 3.)

12:09am: Funny to think that one half to two thirds of the middle-aged men standing in the background of every shot are just waiting to get Time’s Upped.

12:11am: We get a better look at Laura Dern, also in white. Is there a dress code we haven’t been told about? “She’s long and lean and she looks like a pillar. A goddess” says Giuliana Radic, recovering herself just in time.

12:13am: Ah, no, the reason nobody has any colours on is that Whoopi Goldberg has them all:

…and we’re pretty sure she’s also wearing the Pantone Color Of The Year, Ultra Violet! Oscars BINGO! Shots all round!

12:17am: Did someone just offer “semi-congratulations” to Allison Janney?

12:18am: Maybe it was “Many congratulations”.

That seems likelier, in a way.

12:19am: Teen Vogue, where we get most of our news from (this is true), is reporting that Ryan Seacrest is on a delay in case he gets shade thrown at him. If this is true they’re totally messing up our chances of getting a BINGO there.

12:20am: “I’m so proud of you”, Ryan says to Tiffany Haddish. “I’m so proud of you too!”, she says. We are all proud of each other.

12:24am: Our internet went down! That was exciting. And Armie Hammer is here! So add a late Bingo line for “unscheduled red-carpet puking”.

12:26am: Allison Janney, who was in smoking hot pink for her Independent Spirit Awards win yesterday, is in bright red. Everyone is very excited to see an Actual Colour.

12:28am: J-Law is here! She’s in gold, which news we are happy to bring you courtesy of the essential @JenniferUpdates Twitter account:

12:31am: “I like the permy hair”, says one of E!’s red carpet presenters.

“Is that a word?”, wonders his co-host.

(The answer, for the avoidance of doubt, is No.)

12:32am: Daniel Kaluuya! And he’s in gold! “Get Out ticks a lot of boxes”, says an interviewer. “Articulating the black experience is not ticking a box,” Daniel says. Daniel, have we told you lately that we love you?

12:34am: Chadwick Boseman is being praised for having zips on his shoes rather than laces.

12:37am: It’s not gold, it’s…orange? What it is, is awesome:

12:39am: It’s OSCARS BINGO as some veiled but clear shade is thrown at Ryan Seacrest:

https://twitter.com/Diane_7A/status/970457982541750272

12:42am: James Ivory’s ace shirt is even acer than we thought because that is Timothee Chalamet he’s wearing:

12:43am: Chalamet is here with his mum! Oscars bingo! How many shots is that so far? We make it three. Maybe four, just in case.

Let’s say four. For luck.

12:45am: Saoirse Ronan is in pastel pink with very straight hair. She is dressed exactly how Lady Bird would dress for the Oscars.

12:47am: Nicole Kidman wins!

12:50am: “Nicole’s dress is a bit like a Quality Street wrapper”, says Blake.

(Cracknel?)

12:59am: Sorry, we all went to replenish our supplies of hard-boiled eggs and cigars. We’re back now, and unclear about whether the ceremony is starting now, or in half an hour. We’ll let you know as soon as we have more information, but for now it might be a good time to go for a pee.

1:02am: It seems like Emma Stone is in a suit? In years gone by we’d have had a Bingo for that, but we forgot to include it this year. Hey, have a drink anyway, why not?

Oh wait, this is the actual Oscars. Come back from the loo! The Oscars are starting!

1:03am: “He presided over the most calamitous finale in Oscar history…please welcome your host, Jimmy Kimmel!” And we’re live!

01:04am: “This year when you hear your name called, don’t get up right away. Give us a minute.” Bingo!

01:05am: “Oscar is ninety years old this year, which means he’s probably at home watching Fox News.”

01:06am: Jimmy now explaining how bad Hollywood has been at the whole sexism thing. “We made a movie called ‘What Women Want’ and it starred Mel Gibson.”

01:07am: “If we can stop sexual harassment in the workplace, women will only have to deal with it all the time, everywhere else they go.”

01:08am: “I remember a time when studios didn’t believe that a woman or a minority could open a superhero movie. And the reason I remember that time is that it was March of last year.”

Greta Gerwig is in ORANGE.

01:10am: Jordan Peele is introduced as only the third person in ninety years to be nominated for Picture, Screenplay and Director for their first feature. He is wearing white and looks entirely unperturbed by this news.

01:12am: “Thanks to Guillermo we will always remember this year as the year men screwed up so badly, women started dating fish.”

Timothee Chalamet looks like the ghost of an Edwardian child.

01:14am: Whoever makes the shortest acceptance speech of the night will win a jet-ski, says Jimmy. Helen Mirren is here to present the jet-ski. “In the event of a tie, the jet-ski will go to Christopher Plummer.”

01:16am: It’s Best Supporting Actor! And here’s Viola Davis in the best pink of all, to present. We’re pretty sure this is going to Sam Rockwell for his turn as a Racist Cop.

01:18am: Imagine if it went to Christopher Plummer, the oldest ever acting nominee. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

And the Oscar goes to…

Sam Rockwell! And he full-lip-kisses Woody Harrelson (also nominated, for the same film), which is adorable. And then thanks his co-nominees.

01:20am: Sam made Frances McDormand cry. He thanks “everyone who was involved with Three Billboards…everyone who’s ever looked at a billboard.”

01:21am: We’re behind the scenes with Gal Gadot and Armie Hammer, who is wearing red. Red! They are chatting to each other the way newsreaders do after the credits start to roll.

01:24am: Armie Hammer and Gal Gadot are presenting the Hair and Make Up award (Darkest Hour), and we’re keenly watching Armie for signs of stomach flu.

01:27am: The Oscar goes to Darkest Hour and we’re introducing a new Bingo category, which is that you get to have a drink every time the winner is something other than what we told you it would be.

Maybe they fitted Armie with a bag.

01:29am: It’s Costume Design! Presented by Eva-Marie Saint!

“I’m older than the Academy”, Eva-Marie says.

01:31am: She called him “Fred” Hitchcock! Everybody go home, nothing better than this can happen tonight.

01:32am: The prize goes to Mark Bridges for Phantom Thread, like what we said it would. No drink for you yet, sorry.

01:37am: Laura Dern and Greta Gerwig are presenting the award for Documentary Feature, which almost certainly means we’re about to see Agnes Varda, who is bound to be wearing the best gown of the night.

01:41am: And the Oscar goes to Icarus, which is the second least interesting of them all! Although it has a Russian conspiracy angle, which may have snuck it into the lead.

01:43am: Alex Zane hair watch update: the eighties called and they want their Soul Glo back.

01:44am: It’s the first song, Mary J. Blige’s Mighty River from Mudbound. Mary has gone from white to red and seems entirely chilled about giving one Oscar-nominated performance while the other one plays on the screen behind her.

01:47am: This is a BARNSTORMING performance. Did we say this song would win? We didn’t, did we? Well, it probably won’t. But it SHOULD.

“I prefer the staging of this song to the song itself”, says Dave.

“I think we all needed a song there and Mary J. gave us it” says Blake, incontrovertibly.

01:52am: The quality of punditry on the Sky sofa is actually offensive to anyone who’s spent even a cursory amount of time thinking about the Oscars. They could invite some randoms in off the street and they would be exactly as incisive as this lot (Boyd Hilton, Rachel Riley, Bhaskar and someone who claims to be a film critic).

01:54am: So far the speeches, the montages and even the monologue have all been a bit…subdued. Mary J. gave us a bit of pep, at least.

01:55am: Is “pep” a thing that people still say?

01:56am: Alex Zane hair watch update: Dave thinks he looks “a bit like the Queen”. The actual Queen?  Not exactly, he says, but this version:

01:58am: The kids from Baby Driver are here to present Sound Editing. In which Baby Driver is a nominee. Are they even allowed to do that? We predicted Dunkirk in this category, although the cheers for The Shape Of Water suggests that it’s the favourite, at least inside the Dolby Theatre.

But the Oscar goes to…Dunkirk!

02:01am: And now it’s Sound Mixing. Will the Baby Driver stars get to present an award to their own crew?

There’s a LOT of love for The Shape Of Water in the room.

02:02am: The Oscar goes to Dunkirk! Americans say Dunkirk weirdly. “DUN-kirk”, they say.

02:03am: Alex Zane hair watch update: he wishes it looked this good:

02:08am: Of course, Americans don’t know how to pronounce Dunkirk because none of them have ever been there. #topical

02:09am: It’s Lupita Nyong’o and Kumail Nanjiani to present Production Design (The Shape Of Water)! “I am from Pakistan and Iowa”, says Kumail. “Two places that nobody in Hollywood can find on a map.”

02:11am: The Oscar goes to The Shape Of Water!

02:13am: Huh, not one of us realised that the Production Design for The Shape Of Water was done by Green Day!

02:15am: Gael Garcia Bernal is singing the song from Coco, and he’s very evidently flat. “Someone technical should be getting fired for that”, says Dave.

02:21am: The problem with all the ad breaks is that people with nothing to say have to fill a bunch of space. Alex Zane us now descending into semi-aware Partridge-isms about fish-fucking.

02:22am: It’s Foreign Language Film, presented by Rita Moreno in That Dress! We really hope it’s A Fantastic Woman and that we get to see Daniela Vega’s Oscars look.

And the Oscar goes to A Fantastic Woman!

Daniela Vega is in fuschia and tears and our hearts are big.

02:27am: Supporting Actress next, and we assume another win for Allison Janney. It also means we get to see Mahershala Ali, yay. (Mary J. Blige should win here, but won’t).

02:30am: The Oscar goes to Allison Janney! Will she be political? Be political!

02:31am: Margot Robbie is crying. Allison is not political.

“Next”, says the announcer, “The cast of Star Wars: The Last Jedi“. Pee break, anyone?

02:34am: We’re re-viewing the Supporting Actress announcement. Nobody quite wins the Samuel L. Jackson Memorial Really Bad Loser Award, although Laurie Metcalfe comes close. The position remains open, however.

02:37am: The Star Wars cast are here to present the Animated Short award, which we think will go to Dear Basketball.

It’s BB8! He’s still the best one.

Reactions to the appearance of BB8 at MostlyFilm Towers range from “YAAAAS BB8” (Blake) to “Shit the bed!” (Dave).

02:39am: Mark Hamill makes the announcement…”And the Oscar goes to…don’t say La La Land, don’t say La La Land…Dear Basketball!”

02:40am: You guys, Kobe Bryant is really tall!

Say, does anybody want some ice-cream? We have Twiglets too. And, unaccountably, an unstarted lasagne.

02:41am: And now the same team are presenting Animated Feature, which we all expect will go to Coco.

And the Oscar goes to Coco!

02:43am: The Coco team thank “the people of Mexico”, and veer into some Trump-baiting politics, which frankly we’re all here for.

02:44am: Daniela Vega introduces Sufjan Stephens’ song from Call Me By Your Name, making her the first trans Oscar presenter (that we know of).

02:48am: Dave likes the song but doesn’t think it will win. Since he hasn’t listened to any of them before tonight (despite having seen all of the films, clearly without paying actual attention), we will have to wait until all five songs have been performed before we get his professional verdict on them.

“Alexandre’s score will win”, says Dave. “He’s a nice bloke, I’ll be pleased for him.”

(Although actually, Dave’s favourite is the Phantom Thread score, and only maybe because he’s a guest at MF Towers and is politely indulging our preferences.)

02:52am: VFX is up next. Monkey vs Monkey(s). War for the Planet of the Apes will obviously beat Kong because it has more apes, right?

02:54am: The Oscar goes to Blade Runner 2049! Laura has to apologise to the rest of the crew, who all predicted this win and she ignored them all and went for Andy Serkiss Goes Ape.

The Blade Runner team are Jaws-ed off, as is traditional for long-winded winners in technical categories.

02:56am: It’s Matthew McConnaughello! The original inspiration for Alex Zane’s Hair. He’s presenting the Editing award, in which we made a prediction for Dunkirk.

02:57am: The Oscar goes to Dunkirk!

Matt McC says DunKIRK the normal way. But then, if you asked Matt to go to war for you, he totally would.

03:00am: Ah, it’s time for an Oscars Stunt. Jimmy is taking a bunch of Oscar superstars over the road to the Chinese Theater, to surprise the punters. Although we are wondering whether this is, in fact, the setup for a joke. Especially as the punters are watching Ava DuVernay’s A Wrinkle In Time and frankly, interrupting that in order to point a pukey Armie Hammer at them seems unfair, to say the least.

The aisles of the Dolby Theater seem to be strewn with Aztec Marigolds à la Coco, which is a sweet touch.

03:07am: Gal Gadot (thank god, they found someone the punters will recognise) is delivering Oscar goodies to the audience inside the Chinese Theater.

03:09am: “Are you enjoying A Wrinkle In Time so far?” Jimmy asks a random dude. He was till you blundered in and screwed up his evening, Jimmy!

Random dude turns out to be called Mike, is asked to introduce the next segment and mangles Tiffany Haddish’s name. Is that a Bingo? It probably doesn’t count if you didn’t have any time to practice it, right? But hey, it’s 3am, have a goshdarnd drink.

03:11pm: Maya Rudolf and Tiffany Haddish are presenting the next award, and have both taken their shoes off. “When we came out together” says Tiffany, “we know some of you were thinking, are the Oscars too black now?”. “But don’t worry,” adds Maya, “there are sooooo many more white people to come.”

03:13am: So what happened there was that Laura, who is as always driving the bus (hi!), got so excited about the winner of the Documentary Short category being the fabulous Heaven Is A Traffic Jam On The 405 that she forgot to write about it. Apologies. We’re back in the room now. And pretty soon I’ll figure out whether to write about herself in the first, third or plural person.

03:16am: Now it’s Live Action Short, in which we are expecting a (deserved) win for DeKalb Elementary.

But the Oscar goes to The Silent Child! Rachel Shenton, who wrote and stars, is signing her acceptance speech, which she’s also using to reinforce the point (about accessibility of help and services for deaf children) that the film makes. Hollyoaks wins an Oscar! And is Jaws-ed off, but you can’t win them all.

03:20am: It’s time for the Common song, from Marshall. Has anybody seen Marshall? Maybe Common has (probably not).

Oh but first, some tiresome shitbagging from the Sky sofa! Alex Zane calls Robocop 2 underrated, which is an opinion only someone with no actual opinions would have.

Ironically, when Common was a kid he wasn’t allowed to watch ITV and he’s never tasted a Findus Crispy Pancake.

Common delivers an impromptu Parkland moment ahead of his song. And then aces his song. The first standing ovation for a vocal performance tonight, we think.

03:26am: It’s time for the #TimesUp moment, with Salma Hayek, Ashley Judd and Annabella Sciorra. They look, sound and are amazing, and introduce a segment showcasing some of the most exciting recent work by women, people of colour, trans people and other minorities. “We need your movie. I need your movie. So go make it”, says Greta Gerwig. This has just enough bite to stop it from being self-congratulatory. It was always going to be hard to pitch it right, but they’ve done a pretty great job.

03:32am: Chadwick Boseman (our secret boyfriend) and Margot Robbie (our secret girlfriend) are introducing Adapted Screenplay, which is going to Call Me By Your Name.

03:33am: The winner is James Ivory, for Call Me By Your Name!

03:34am: When you are James Ivory, you get to write a really great acceptance speech.

03:35am: And you get to be the only person in 2018 who thanks Ismail Merchant for your Oscar win.

03:36am: Nicole Kidman, in the best dress, is here to introduce Original Screenplay. This is a big one and a tense one…

03:37am: The award goes to Jordan Peele for Get Out! Fuck yeah!

03:40am: Ad break. And, we all need to calm down.

03:44am: Wes Studi is introducing a segment where we pay tribute to…military movies? I mean, sure. Why not?

03:46am: THERE you go, that took forever but we get some Matt Damon shade from Kimmel. DRINK!

03:47am: “For all of you who say that the Oscars are all about the elites, I’ll have you know that each of the Swarovski crystals decorating the stage tonight represents humility”, says Jimmy.

03:48am: It’s Cinematography, which we really want Roger Deakins to win. It’s his time!

Big cheers inside the Dolby Theater for Rachel Morrison and Mudbound, but the Oscar goes to Roger Deakins for Blade Runner 2049, and that’s his first win after fourteen nominations and MostlyFilm Towers erupts in cheers. “What a likeable dude”, says Dave, who was actually born in the 1970s and only sounds like he hard-lived through them.

03:51am: Time for the last song of the night with This Is Me from The Greatest Showman, which has been a weird sleeper hit, taking minimal box office to begin with but then just sticking around until nearly everyone you know has seen it, like that time Prince carried on playing in London until there was nobody left in London who hadn’t been.

03:53am: We like the staging again. It’s a middling song. But does the last one to be performed quite often win?

The Entertainment Weekly red carpet people said Keala Settle was too ill to sing this, so we’re glad she made it along. Maybe they saw her kissing Armie Hammer and extrapolated.

03:56am: We suspect it’s almost time for the Montage Of The Dead.

03:58am: Woody Harrelson has the best seat in the house. It’s time for the Original Score prize! We can read the categories off the envelopes, because they’ve made them REALLY BIG THIS YEAR.

03:59am: Christopher Walken! We have no idea what he’s talking about, but that’s as it should be. We would all love a Johnny Greenwood win, which is also what we predicted, but it’s going to be Desplat, isn’t it?

And the Oscar goes to The Shape Of Water and Alexandre Desplat, who apparently really likes good green tea (more celebrity insights as we get them). Dave has won £1 on his £5 bet at 1/5. The Milky Bars are on him!

(This is much funnier if you know what he looks like.)

04:02am: WE’RE INTO THE LAST HOUR, FOLKS. And here’s a chart to warm your heart:

04:04am: Original Song goes to Remember Me from Coco and here are the Lopez-Anderson-Lopezes accepting it charmingly.

04:06am: OK, now it really is the Montage Of The Dead. And this year the role of Barbra Streisand is played by Eddie Vedder, singing a Tom Petty number whose name we missed because we were arguing amongst ourselves, but on reflection we think it’s Room At The Top.

04:13am: Boyd Hilton on the Sky sofa thinks that Director is going to “Gorilla del Toro”.

04:14am: Time for the Director award and Guillermo’s moment in the sun. Emma Stone isn’t just wearing a suit, she’s wearing a trouser suit. “These four men, and Greta Gerwig, created their own masterpieces”, she says.

And the Oscar goes, to nobody’s surprise, to Guillermo del Toro!

04:21am: Jane Fonda and Helen Mirren are here and everything is so fabulous we can’t speak momentarily.

It’s Best Actor and we want Day Lewis, would be happy with Kaluuya and are fully expecting Oldman.

Denzel is of course The Best Actor Of All Time Period, but nobody saw that movie.

04:25am: The winner is Gary Oldman! Thank Lesley, go on.

It’s not so bad, perhaps, if we can all agree that it’s a lifetime achievement award?

04:29am: Oldman is wanging on to an extraordinary degree. “I’m not winning the jet-ski, am I?” he acknowledges part way through (and then keeps going).

04:30am: Jodie Foster and Jennifer Lawrence are here to present Best Actress and are (a) funnier than we thought they would be  – because it feels like it will be contrived, but actually they make it seem easy and fun (MAYBE BECAUSE THEY’RE GOOD AT ACTING) – and (b) VERY different in height. We don’t know whether J-Law is surprisingly tall or J-Fos is surprisingly short, but either way it’s interesting!

Now let’s wait for Frances McDormand to win the Oscar!

Although it should be Margot Robbie.

04:34am: Every performance in this category is amazing! Give them all a prize. And one for Vicky Krieps too.

But the Oscar goes to Frances McDormand!

04:35am: “I’m hyperventilating a little bit, if I fall over pick me up because I’ve got some things to say.”

04:37am: Frances asks every female nominee in every category to stand up. “Meryl if you do it, everyone else will. ” She’s right! And they do! It’s better and more thrilling than we’re going to be able to make it sound.

04:39am: The Best Picture envelope gets a close-up, just so we know they’re not going to fuck it up again. Although they are getting Warren and Faye to do it, so who knows?

Bonnie and Clyde reference! Have a drink, go on.

04:44am: We’re assuming the Best Picture will go to La La Land.

04:45am: We’re all feeling quite stressed and nauseous. Maybe we have Armie’s stomach flu.

04:46am: And the Oscar goes to The Shape Of Water! The one contender that nobody expected!

(Not counting the five contenders that nobody expected.)

04:48am: Sally Hawkins has the dress of the fricken night, you guys. And Guillermo’s speech very much chimes with the theme of the evening. “This is the door. Kick it open and come in.”

04:50am: We’re awarding the prize for Best Speech to Frances McDormand, we’re sad Get Out didn’t win but if it was going to miss out then the genre movie led by a woman is a pretty good consolation prize. Some of us are ready for bed and some of us are going to stay up for the next three hours because we’re too wired to do anything else.

Alex Zane can’t even read out tweets! That’s all he’s for!

Well, that and the hair.

04:52am: You guys, that’s us done: for tonight, for this year and – for now – for always. Stay safe, keep on runnin’ and we’ll see you on the other side. We’re off to enjoy our Oscars breakfast of welsh rarebit with a poached egg, bacon, scones, butter, cream, ham, a pot of Lapsang Souchong tea, and some sausages.

Hello! We’re liveblogging the Oscars here again tomorrow night for the can-you-believe-it seventh year in a row, although since in 2012 we all went to bed after the red carpet it only half counted. Tomorrow, though, we’ll be pulling the full all-nighter once again, and over the years we’ve discovered that the best way to get through the ceremony, not counting booze and drugs, is to have a horse in every race. So here for your consideration are MostlyFilm’s carefully-chosen picks for this year’s gongs. Place your bets now! Note: MostlyFilm takes no responsibility for losses incurred as a result of the advice given below.

Best Picture
This category is almost impossible to predict this year, because there’s no obvious front-runner, or if there is it changes twice a week, and all of the films in contention have at least one stat against them which would rule them out of the race in a normal year. But this isn’t a normal year, and so the best I can confidently do for you is to split the contenders into definitely-won’t-wins and might-wins.

Definitely-won’t-wins: Darkest Hour, because it’s terrible; The Post, because if you’re Spielberg, Streep and Hanks you have to outdo yourselves, rather than anybody else, in order to win an Oscar, and they didn’t; Lady Bird, because it’s not as good as they said it was; Call Me By Your Name, because it’s insubstantial; and Phantom Thread, because it’s by Paul Thomas Anderson and therefore immediately divisive, despite being in many ways his most accessible film yet. But the way the Best Picture is chosen (where members list their favourites from top to bottom, the votes are counted and the lowest-scoring candidates discarded and the votes recounted, the whole process repeating for as long as it takes for a film to take over 50% of the remaining votes) means that divisive films don’t win, as La La Land memorably demonstrated last year.

Might-wins: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, because it has virtuoso performances from actors whom everybody loves; The Shape Of Water, because it has by far the most nominations; Dunkirk, because nobody hates it and the peculiarities thrown up by the preferential ballot system mean that might be enough; and Get Out, because it is the best picture (although I would find it hard to direct my vote between it and Phantom Thread, but for the FORTY SECOND YEAR RUNNING nobody has invited me to join the Academy, so my personal preferences are irrelevant).

I honestly can’t call it: a couple of weeks ago I was confidently telling people that Three Billboards couldn’t win because too many people hate it, but then it went and swept everything at BAFTA, and it won the SAG Ensemble award, and Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell have won their categories in most of the Guild awards, and it sort of looks unstoppable, except that there’s that whole racism thing, which I hope and believe will  stop it. If it does, then Get Out will win. So I’m still going for Get Out.

Director
Guillermo del Toro has won this at every other awards this year and he will win it again tomorrow. As I said about Damien Chazelle last year, if your movie is nominated for twice as many Oscars as anyone else’s that makes you the best director, regardless of how many actual wins it gets.

Actor
If it were up to me then this category would be all about Daniel Day Lewis in Phantom Thread, but as it is, Gary Oldman is going to take home the little gold man for services to fat-suits. I’m being mean, he is the best thing in a bad film. (But it’s a really bad film.)

Actress
My theory vis-a-vis Three Billboards is that, like when they gave Hacksaw Ridge Oscars for Editing and Sound Mixing, the Academy members will want to reward a movie they like without giving a prize to its director, whom they don’t. And the most obvious way to reward Three Billboards is to give Oscars to the actors who managed to turn a script that, on the page, is mostly long strings of swear-words, into something engaging and watchable. Frances McDormand is never not good and she’s fantastic in this.

Supporting Actor
The same as above, only for Sam Rockwell. Although I would vote for Willem Dafoe, and if I could give The Florida Project all the Oscars, I would.

Supporting Actress
Everyone loves Alison Janney, and why wouldn’t they? Even though her character in (the otherwise fabulous) I, Tonya is kind of a monotone pantomime villain. But everyone loves Alison Janney and so she will win. (I would give it to Mary J. Blige, who is understated but spellbinding in Mudbound, which won’t win anything and should, although if she were only nominated I would actually give it to Betty Gabriel for her extraordinary turn as Georgina in Get Out.)

Cinematography
This is a tricky one this year, because Cinematography almost always goes to a film which also has a Best Picture nomination, and the winner is often a clue as to who’s taking home the big prize. We can probably rule out Mudbound‘s Rachel Morrison – who is, if you can believe it, the first woman ever to be nominated in this category – simply because not enough people will have seen the film (it was released on Netflix, where you can still see it if you haven’t already – although, brace yourself; it’s not an easy watch). And Blade Runner 2049 doesn’t have a Best Picture nomination either so I would usually discount that too, except that it won the BAFTA, and its cinematographer is Roger Deakins, for whom this is the FOURTEENTH Oscar nomination without a win to show for it. So I’d love it to go to Deakins, even though the other nominees (Darkest Hour, Dunkirk, The Shape Of Water) are all also Best Picture contenders and therefore – on paper at least – more likely to win. But screw it, let’s go Deakins and Blade Runner 2049.

Costume Design
There was an upset last week in the world of Costume Design when Phantom Thread, which was seemingly on a relentless path to victory in this category, lost out to The Shape Of Water at the Costume Designers Guild Awards. It’s true, as some have pointed out, that the clothes in Phantom Thread are strange and ugly. My theory is that that’s the point, because it’s an autobiographical piece about a genius who makes works of art which some people think are strange and ugly. Which would make Mark Bridges’ designs brilliant and perfect, whereas Luis Sequeira’s costumes for The Shape Of Water, while perfectly pretty, don’t tell you anything more about the story or characters. I mean, is the fish-man outfit a costume, or a makeup, or a special effect? Maybe that’s what the Costume Designers were voting for? My vote is still going to Phantom Thread.

Editing
Editing is another award that often goes to the Best Picture winner, but if I’m sticking with Get Out as the overall winner, and I am, then I have to go off-piste here because it doesn’t have an Editing nomination (it should). Note: if this goes to Three Billboards then I am likely wrong about how divisive it is, and its chances of taking Best Picture will go shooting up. But the Academy likes films that look like they’ve been edited, which is why Birdman didn’t get a nomination, and why my best bet in this category is Dunkirk, which is three films expertly and visibly stitched together into one.

Foreign Language Film
They’re such big, stupid categories, aren’t they? There’s no way to sensibly compare a Russian tragedy about a missing child with a Swedish comedy about about art with a Chilean drama about transphobia, not to mention all the hundreds and hundreds of brilliant films which don’t get a look-in because of the one-film-per-country limitation. The problem gets worse in the Documentary Feature category, where nobody can even agree from year to year on what the criteria for qualifying should be (to take only the most current example: last year’s winner, OJ: Made In America, would not be eligible this year). Anyway, I’m excited about seeing all of the stars of all the films, of course – it’s why I stay up all night – but I especially want to see the two leads in Loveless – just, you know, to make sure they’re OK. The prize, though, is almost certainly going to A Fantastic Woman, which is fine because I also really want to see Daniela Vega in real life (where in real life = “on TV”).

Makeup and Hairstyling
I would give this to I, Tonya, which got its eighties and nineties styling dazzlingly spot-on, but they didn’t nominate it, so I guess it’s back to Gary Oldman and his fat-suit with a win for Darkest Hour.

Original Score
All the big guns are out in this race, with John Williams (Star Wars: The Last Jedi), Hans Zimmer (Dunkirk), Carter Burwell (Three Billboards) and Alexandre Desplat (The Shape Of Water) among those facing off for the prize. The latter is the favourite but on the basis that it’s the actual best score and that he lost out on a technicality with his equally dazzling music for There Will Be Blood, I’m going for Johnny Greenwood and Phantom Thread.

Original Song
I mean, it’s going to be the Lopez-Anderson-Lopez number, right? Even though we’re obviously all more excited about seeing Mary J. Blige (I assume she will wear at least two different outfits on the night, one per Oscar nomination) and Common, who by now has an Oscars residency. But I still think Coco for the win.

Production Design
If Guillermo del Toro is winning Director for bringing a singular vision to life then the category in which this is most evidently successful is this one, because The Shape Of Water is an exceptional feat of world-building. It doesn’t look quite like anything but itself, but it looks exactly like itself and it will win this prize.

Animated Feature
So here’s the thing. I haven’t seen any of them! Not even Loving Vincent, which sounded like it might be my kind of thing but then looked, on further inspection, sort of stupid. However, my best guess, and the bookies’, is Coco. I mean, I hope it’s not The Boss Baby.

Animated Short
The odds are massively favouring Kobe Bryant’s Dear Basketball here, and it is a lovely – if staggeringly self-involved – little film. But are they going to give an Oscar to a man previously accused of sexual assault in this year of all years? My favourite by some way is Garden Party, which is hilariously un-Oscary, and I note that my esteemed colleagues have gone for Negative Space, and what we can all agree on is that it definitely won’t be Revolting Rhymes. And we haven’t even mentioned the Pixar! It’ll be the Pixar, right? It’ll be Lou, which is neither the best nor anybody’s favourite.

Documentary Feature
The only nominee in this category that I haven’t managed to see is Agnès Varda’s Visages, Villages, which is almost certain to win, with (at the time of writing) the shortest odds of any candidate in any category. But I’m going to use this opportunity to urge you to see Feras Fayyad’s Last Men In Aleppo, which is just completely and utterly devastating and you won’t be glad you watched it, but you should anyway.

Documentary Short
This was my top category this year: I loved all of the films in different ways, and you know what? You can watch them all online! And you don’t even have to seek them out, because I’ve done all the work for you!

Edith + Eddie is the bookies’ favourite and has a wildly promising premise, but I’m not sure the film-making quite lives up to the story it tries to tell. Traffic Stop (requires a NowTV subscription, but you can get a 14-day free trial) is both shocking and depressingly predictable and has a fabulously engaging central figure in Breaion King, the African-American teacher stopped for speeding. Knife Skills (iTunes), about ex-prisoners working in a restaurant, is more multilayered and complex than I was expecting. My two favourites were Heaven Is A Traffic Jam On The 405 and Heroin(e) (Netflix) and while the former is my absolute top tip for you to watch, the latter has a more obviously appealing subject and some genuinely life-affirming moments, so that’s my prediction. But I cried and laughed at all of these films and will be happy with a win for any one of them.

Live Action Short
There are four good films and one extended Armstrong and Miller sketch in this category this year. I loved Rachel Shenton’s The Silent Child (Chris Overton directs, but Shenton is writer and star) but I can’t imagine the Academy not taking the chance to talk about guns in schools on the world’s biggest stage by voting for DeKalb Elementary.

Sound Editing/Sound Mixing
Like I splained yer last year, Sound Editing is where you design the sounds and Sound Mixing is where you make them part of the film. So space films and war films are always a good bet for the former, because they have sounds that have to be made up from scratch (unless you actually go to space, or to war), and anything with a complicated soundscape has a good chance with the latter. Dunkirk is a war film with a complicated soundscape, so I’m predicting a one-two in these categories, although Baby Driver might sneak Mixing on the basis that it has two soundtracks at once, which is also a clever trick, she said grudgingly.

Visual Effects
Well now, I don’t really go to see films with monsters or spaceships in, so I asked my esteemed colleagues where they thought this award was going and they all said Blade Runner 2049, but – begging their joint pardons – the winds of internet wisdom seem to be blowing in the direction of War for the Planet of the Apes, and if VFX is mostly about turning people into creatures then it has to be admitted that the golden combination of Andy Serkis and Joe Letteri (and his team) did produce a more or less perfect ape.

Adapted Screenplay
Three of the nominees in this category (The Disaster Artist, Molly’s Game and Logan) have been pretty much bypassed by the Oscars buzz and another, Mudbound, will continue to be penalised for not having had a proper theatrical release, so this should be an easy win for Call Me By Your Name. Also, if James Ivory writes you a screenplay, you give the prize to James Ivory.

Original Screenplay
…whereas Original is a real battleground. Here’s another of my baseless theories: if this award is presented at the start of the evening, as it often is, then it likely hasn’t gone to the eventual Best Picture winner and there’s everything left to play for. But if they save it for a late slot, as they did last year with Moonlight, then it’s much likelier that one of The Shape Of Water, Lady Bird, Get Out and Three Billboards has taken both, although in my view it can only be one of the latter two. If Lady Bird‘s going win anything at all it could be here (or just possibly in Best Supporting Actress, but I’m fairly sure Alison Janney has that sewn up), so that’s an outside possibility, but I’ve been saying for a year, and I don’t see why I should change my mind now, that this will be a win for Get Out.

To find out just how wrong all of this was, join me, Ricky Young, Blake Backlash, MarvMarsh and Clio on the red carpet and later inside the Dolby Theater for another round of the internet’s finest slightly-delayed Oscars coverage. Bring beer.

MostlyFilm’s live Oscars coverage begins here at 10.30pm tomorrow night.

Indy Datta on the live-action shorts

So I won’t do the greatest hits of previous years thistimearound, bitching about how the Academy’s eligibility rules for this category are wildly outdated, the conservatism the nominees skew towards as a result, how often the films are, really, pretty poor, and how long they tend to be. I like long films! But short films should be short, innit.

This year’s crop isn’t bad, to be fair, as these things go. Ironically, the one that most conspicuously outstays its welcome is the shortest, the Australian The Eleven O’Clock (directed by Derin Seale and written by and starring Josh Lawson) – an overextended, if slickly mounted and performed comedy sketch about a psychiatrist taking an appointment with a man who believes that he is the psychiatrist.

The other four films are all hot-button social issue dramas, three of them are based on true stories.

The British The Silent Child is the frankest about its consciousness-raising intentions, and there is authenticity in its presentation of a young deaf girl and the sign-language teacher who makes a connection with her (played by the film’s writer Rachel Shenton; the director was her erstwhile on-screen Hollyoaks colleague Chris Overton – this is his first directorial outing). I was less taken with the cartoon villainess of a mother the film uses to make its point. The American My Nephew Emmett is about the night in 1955 that 14 year old Emmett Till was taken from his great uncle Mose Wright’s Mississippi shack and brutally murdered by two white men. The film concentrates on evoking the dread felt by Wright when he hears that Emmett had been seen whistling at a white woman and his powerlessness to stop what’s coming. Writer-director Kevin Wilson Jr’s stately film-making echoes the work of Dee Rees on the nominated feature Mudbound.

The German Wotu Wate (All of Us) – directed by Katja Benrath and written by Tobias Rosen – is a competent depiction of a 2015 incident in Mandera, Kenya, in  which a bus carrying both Christian and Muslim passengers was ambushed by Al Shabaab militants, and the Muslims concealed the Christians amongst them, even at the cost of some of their own lives.

For me, the nominated film whose film making most significantly elevates the impact of its script – and the only one which feels fully realised as a short film of exactly the right length for its story (and neither an overextended sketch or a proof of concept for something more expansive) – is the American DeKalb Elementary: a tight, spare, real-time dramatisation of a real-life incident in which a school receptionist tries to talk a gunman down from mass murder. Writer-director Reed van Dyk builds carefully on a real-life incident recorded as a 911 call made by the receptionist, and frames and stages the action without a wasted gesture, shooting in a single room. This is obviously the best film here, but I’m predicting My Nephew Emmett as the winner.

Spank The Monkey on the animated shorts

It was so much easier when we first did this back in 2013. A collection of the Oscar-nominated animated shorts was released in arthouse cinemas across the UK, and even if the programme never made it to your town you could see them all for free on YouTube. Nowadays, the only way to see these shorts legitimately in the UK is to buy Shorts TV’s digital download package of the nominees. But unlike the equivalent live-action selection, two of the five animated shorts have been withheld from the package owing to rights issues. Admittedly there are other methods of watching those two, but it’s still a complication that shouldn’t really be there.

Inevitably, one of the withheld films is the Disney entry. Usually, their submission for the animated short Oscar is based around some sort of technical breakthrough, but Dave Mullins’ Lou is a fairly average piece of work for Pixar: then again, it was only ever intended to be a supporting feature for Cars 3, so it didn’t need to be that good. There’s some neat visual imagination in the way that the contents of a lost and found box anthropomorphise themselves in multiple configurations, but very little of interest beyond that.

The other film not included in the package is Jakob Schuh and Jan Lachauer’s Revolting Rhymes, as seen on BBC TV. Roald Dahl’s creepy reworkings of old fairy tales still retain their notorious darkness, most notably in the decision to release this first part of a two-part series as a standalone film, bleak cliffhanger and all. But Quentin Blake’s illustrations have been smoothed out by cutesy CGI so that they won’t freak out a Christmas Day telly audience, which makes for an unsettling disconnect between image and subject matter. Also, at 29 minutes this is four times as long as each of the other films here, which shouldn’t affect its chances in a popularity contest but probably will.

Once you get past the corporate behemoths of Disney and the Beeb, there’s still a lot of dull visual slickness on show in this shortlist. Although Kobe Bryant could, I guess, be called a corporate behemoth in his own right: Glen Keane’s Dear Basketball takes Bryant’s narration about what the sport’s meant to him, pumps it up with subtly enhanced hand-drawn animation, and then deflates it all over again with an overly sugary John Williams score. It may mean something if you’re an NBA fan, but it’s likely to leave everyone else cold.

It’s a surprise to discover that the two best shorts this year both come from France. Garden Party, the graduation film of half a dozen students from the MoPA animation school, follows a small group of amphibians as they make their way around an apparently abandoned mansion. Most of the pleasure comes from the amazingly photorealistic depiction of the creatures, to the extent that in another context an audience might not accept it as being animation at all. But there’s also a keen storytelling intelligence in there, as a subplot is slowly revealed in background details.

For me, the best of the five is another French film, Max Porter and Ru Kuwahata’s Negative Space. It’s notable for being the only nominee that isn’t aiming for technical perfection: in this company, its hand-modelled look seems positively charming. Its central character – alarmingly, a dead ringer for Jacob Rees-Mogg – reflects on his relationship with his father, as seen through the lens of their shared interest in suitcase packing techniques. It makes for some delightful visual metaphors, along with a splendidly dark punchline. If you’re looking to bet on a winner, this is the one for me: although bear in mind that the last time I did this in 2016, it was the film I liked the least that won. Dear Basketball, then…

After seven years of MostlyFilm, I asked if I could mark our goodbye by highlighting seven films in the future that I think are worth looking out for. I set myself some rules – no films that have played anywhere in the world yet, so anything at Berlin (bye bye Isle of Dogs) or Sundance, or last Autumn’s festivals (so long Custody) and no sequels or franchises. Not all of these seven films will turn up in 2018, but I’ll be knocking down the door to see them when they do arrive.

Wrong Answer
Directed by Ryan Coogler
Starring Michael B Jordan

Michael B. Jordan is a great screen actor. He showed this in his work on seminal TV shows The Wire and Friday Night Lights and his breakthrough film performance in Ryan Coogler’s indie-hit Fruitvale Station. When Coogler and Jordan teamed up again, in Creed, they produced one of the great pieces of popular cinema in a generation, a soulful, thoughtful blockbuster full of depth, heart and charm. The two men clearly get the best out of each other and their third collaboration – Black Panther – is still breaking all kinds of box-office records.

Their next project, Wrong Answer, is a step back towards the scale and pace of Fruitvale Station: the story of a teacher who gets caught up in a systemic cheating scandal in the Atlanta public school system. The true story provoked lots of questions of morality, honour, integrity and the standardisation of education targets and their impact on, and service to, society as a whole. They seem like themes that Coogler is ideally placed to tackle, and the role of an idealistic, but compromised, man trying to do his best while knowing that doing so means committing a crime could see Jordan get his rightful dues as one of the best actors of his generation.

The Favourite
Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos
Starring Emma Stone, Rachel Weisz, Olivia Colman and Nicholas Hoult

Lanthimos is on an extraordinary run of rich, provocative and outstanding films, dating back to Dogtooth, and incorporating a couple of sly, sneaky and thoroughly vital English language films in The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer. His style has become instantly recognisable and there’s no doubt that people’s expectations and interest would have been highly piqued no matter what he chose to do next.

But… the idea of him working his particular kind of magic on a period drama, one liberally sprinkled with lust, betrayal and royal intrigue is absolutely intoxicating. The film is set in Queen Anne’s court and the shifting of power between her two closest female friends, played by Weisz and Stone. Lanthimos coaxed Weisz’ best performance in years in The Lobster, and the role of Sarah Churchill could be her best and richest role in a very long time. Lanthimos’ skill is such that even if he chooses to tell the story in a traditional way, he’ll bring a frisson of the unexpected and exciting to the project that should make this one of the best period dramas in decades.

The Little Stranger
Directed by Lenny Abrahamson
Starring Domhnall Gleeson, Charlotte Rampling, Will Poulter and Ruth Wilson

The last time novelist Sarah Waters’ work was adapted for big screen, the result was Park Chan-Wook’s extraordinary The Handmaiden. The Little Stranger sees an equally accomplished filmmaker in Lenny Abrahamson taking on Waters’ 2009 novel of the same name.

The project is intriguing for a number of reasons – the book was a departure from some of the themes of Waters’ earlier works, and undoubtedly the film will involve Abrahamson working in a different genre than before. It also provides him with a stellar cast with which to tell the story of a young doctor from a working class background befriending an upper-class but poverty-stricken family in the aftermath of World War 2.

How Abrahamson blends in the social aspects of the story with the gothic and ghostly elements of the plot will be fascinating to see, but given the litany of successes in his career so far, which have seen him move from micro-budgeted Irish indies like Adam and Paul, Garage and What Richard Did to the Oscar-winning Room, there’s little doubt that he has the talent to make it work.

An Uncivil War
Directed by Dee Rees
Starring Carey Mulligan

2019 should be a good year for feminist icons on film. Not only is Dee Rees following up the outstanding Mudbound with An Uncivil War, a biopic of Gloria Steinem; but Mimi Leder is making On the Basis of Sex, a film about the journey Ruth Bader Ginsburg had to take to become the first female US Supreme Court Justice.

Rees’ (and Mulligan’s) excellent work in Mudbound makes An Uncivil War the more exciting project in my eyes, though, not to mention the fascinating story of Steinem’s life. As a feminist, now in her 80s, Steinem has seen, first-hand, some of the biggest changes in Western society, and been one of the most recognisable faces of the feminist movement.

Rees will have plenty of amazing material to work with, including Steinem’s links with the CIA, her changing perspective on Trans rights, her pro-choice activism and her successful career as a journalist and magazine editor.

Maya
Directed by Mia Hansen-Love
Starring Suzan Anbeh, Judith Chemia and Roman Kolinka

Mia Hansen-Love is maybe Europe’s most accomplished director, with four absolutely outstanding films on her CV. Her latest film Maya is the story of a photographer, who is captured and held in Syria for a number of months, and upon his release travels to India.

Kolinka offered strong support in both Eden and Things to Come, Hansen-Love’s previous two features, and steps into the lead role here. Hansen-Love has dealt with big emotional issues throughout her career, from the death of a husband in Father of my Children to finding yourself being less valued as you age in Things to Come. She is certainly capable of handling the heaviness of this subject matter, and there is no doubt that she will find a fascinating way to frame it.

The Nightingale
Directed by Jennifer Kent
Starring Sam Claflin and Aisling Franciosi

Jennifer Kent’s previous film, The Babadook, certainly marked her out as a talent to watch. It was part of a wave of much-loved indie horror movies that included It Follows, The Witch and Raw. Kent hasn’t wasted too much time in switching genres and making her follow-up.

The Nightingale is an Australian Western, a film that follows The Fall and Game of Thrones cast member Aisling Franciosi in the role of a young convict, who teams up with an Aboriginal loner to find, and take revenge upon, the soldier who murdered her family.

With Sam Claflin (coming off a career-best performance in the sadly under-seen Journey’s End) in a lead role, there’s a real excitement about the film, which could see the director’s already impressive reputation soar.

If Beale Street Could Talk
Directed by Barry Jenkins
Starring Kiki Layne, Stephan James, Regina King, Diego Luna, Teyonah Parris, Brian Tyree Henry, Dave Franco and Pedro Pascal

Moonlight was a phenomenon, so what are the chances that Barry Jenkins can follow it up with another masterpiece? Well, you can’t fault his choice of project – Jenkins is adapting James Baldwin’s novel set in Harlem in the 1970s, and has assembled a terrific cast – and much of his Moonlight crew – to bring Baldwin’s work to the screen.

The central story of the film is a love story, between Fonny and Tish. That love is tested when Fonny is falsely accused of rape, and imprisoned, largely due to the actions of a racist cop. The book also focuses on the importance and resilience of family units. Moonlight certainly proved that Jenkins is an outstanding essayer of love stories, and of difficult, complex and loving familial relationships.

It’s hard to imagine a much better director for the material, and with Stephan James and Kiki Layne largely unknown in the lead roles, I would bet on Jenkins (who is also one of the most entertaining film people to follow on Twitter) to strike gold once more.

As MostlyFilm (long regarded as Europe’s Best Website) comes to the end of its existence with all the grace and elegance of an airliner plummeting into a French hillside, we thought we should have a stab at rounding off our Doctor Who coverage. Usually, we’d be on this fairly sharpish – and you can fill your boots with our opinions on previous series by clicking on these handy links – but it’s been two months since the Xmas special, and not a peep! What’s going on?

Well, we’re going to justify it by stating clearly and for the microphone: if Steven Moffat can hang around for far longer than his interest did and come up with something shoddy, half-assed and barely tolerable as his last hurrah, then so can we. In fact, if anything, we can be even more rubbish. Take that, Steve-O!

So join us, do, as we take a look at the 2017 Xmas episode of children’s programme Doctor Who, ‘Twice Upon A Time’, and wonder – probably not for the first time – why anyone lets us near an internet publishing platform.

All in all we liked a lot of series ten, even though it was absolutely clear that it was one set of shows too many for Mr. Moffat. Freed from the shackles of his own self-imposed narrative-engineering tasks (River, Clara etc), there was a bit of perk and sass to the programme that had been missing for a while, although how much of that was actually down to Pearl Mackie as Bill Potts we’ll continue to wonder. Although, having already got rid of one semi-dead character he was bored with by sending them off into space to have offscreen adventures, doing exactly the same thing with Bill was either impressively audacious or the biggest bit of money-for-old-rope the BBC have endured since that time a hungover Nick Knowles sent in his brother to host the lottery quiz.

Christmas episodes of Doctor Who come in one of two flavours – the inoffensive time-passer, like last year’s ‘The Return Of Doctor Mysterio’, where all it has to do is provide enough content to drown out your racist, sherry-enabled uncle; or ones with a specific job to do – say goodbye to one Doctor, and welcome another. This was one of the latter, not that anyone this side of Jupiter didn’t know that, given the surrounding brouhaha.

But for all that brouhaha, as regeneration episodes go it was remarkably quiet and low-key, without much of a story, villain, or reason to exist outside the confines of the job it had to do, i.e. fill an hour and then flick the switch on all that glittery fire.

It is quite sad that Capaldi won’t ever be thought of as one of the great Doctors. God knows he was up for it, and we liked him a whole bunch. But we have to admit to ourselves that the Twelfth Doctor’s personality never quite gelled, be it the dangerous nut-job who first plopped into view, the mooning, Clara-obsessed grumpoid of his middle-years, or the chattery-uncle-you’d-avoid-at-a-wedding of late. And come on, if the whole sunglasses-and-guitar bit wasn’t a loud, irony-free declaration from Moffat that yes, his dick still works amazingly despite hitting the wrong side of fifty, then what was it?

Fucked if any of us can tell.

But even if the bigger picture wasn’t great, on an episodic basis, Capaldi brought the goods, as in ‘Twice Upon A Time’. Even if it was never made exactly clear why the Doctor didn’t want to regenerate, few actors could sell the entire shebang with quite the same level of breathless brio. Don’t worry, Peter, you’ll always be in our top five.

And so the Twelfth Doctor spent his Christmas Day with the First Doctor (we will, of course, try your patience by insisting that at that point in his life he was no such thing) for reasons that weren’t clear then, aren’t clear now, and having sat through it again last night just to make sure, definitely weren’t clear then. It was something to do just because you could, of course, but now that he’s gone and we can speak freely without Twitter hissy-fits being directed at us by the man himself, the thing that irritated us most about Moffat’s tenure on Doctor Who was his self-applied, rather grasping ownership of it all. Treat the history of the show like your own personal sandbox? Fine. Summon up incarnations past and lean on the hard work of the actors and writers by using their creation like a puppet? Sure. Can’t hire who you want for the big anniversary show, so just invent a new Doctor and slot him in there like a book on a shelf, daring anyone to object? Fuck, why not?

Yes, this might seem extraordinarily petty (it is, of course, extraordinarily petty), but previous producers never owned the show, they were only ever lent it, and it always got handed on to the next one more-or-less intact, rather than forever permanently reshaped by the big tacketty boots of a middle-aged Scotch egotist.

And so while David Bradley’s William Hartnell impression could be admired well enough, we were all left wondering, really, why he was there, other than to squirt a bit of Steven’s territory-claiming piss back almost as far as it was possible to go.

The episode passed the time, then, with semi-pointless visits from a few old faces and the guest-star being a sexist twat for reasons that only Moffat knows – was it an ‘I’m Not As Bad As This, Right?’ feint? Yes, that line about the smacked bottom was a direct quote from the mid-sixties, but did the show ever get so squirmingly and context-freely icky as the line about Clara being an enigma squeezed into a skirt that’s a little bit too tight? We’ll answer that – no.

And thus after a valedictory speech that went on too long and was quite frankly needlessly pear-ist in its outlook, on came the fire and fury, and the thing that should have happened ages ago – happened. Given the show-runner is now Chris Chibnall, a man who’s never met a line of dialogue he couldn’t tweak to be more thudding and tone-deaf, good luck to everyone involved.

But it’s goodbye from all of us at MostlyFilm to Mr Steven William Moffat OBE. We’ve been extraordinarily rude to you over the years, but look closely and you’ll see we have taken the time to be quite tender too.

Occasionally.

Sure, we moaned about this and that – it’s all there, on file – and god knows we turned your slippery grasp of the details into semi-regular outbursts of desperate snark that nearly always ended up saying more about us than you. We just need the yuks, you know, we’re awful that way.

You got the show made, though, when it very nearly would have ended if you hadn’t taken up the reins. You defended it against some of Europe’s Worst People, and you lavished a decade of your life on it, sacrificing god knows how much time and effort to produce a silly programme for children.

But to misquote you, and the Doctor, by way of stealing some of the outrageous brass-neck and hubris you’re both famous for:

It’s been a long time coming, but: Steven – we let you go.

Ricky can be avoided on The Tweeter.

Pop music is like a Saturn V rocket – you burn through stages until all that’s left is the important stuff, the rest tumbling behind you as a hybrid of garbage and history. You could lose your mind trying to hold on to things you liked then, trying to force yourself to squeeze that last dopamine hit from a brain dull to the charms of an outdated tune. It takes a lot for a pop song to stay with you. I had a look through a lot of old Mostly Pop columns and YouTube/Spotify playlists to write this, and I honestly couldn’t remember maybe 90% of the stuff I reviewed. Even those that I liked! My “best of the year” lists looked like jigsaw puzzles, half-worked out and abandoned without even finding the corners. So to make this list – and obviously this list was a lot longer when I started out – the song has to mean something. It has to be special.

The final few songs I cut out were the hardest, and I don’t want to leave them out entirely (consider them the second stage of booster rockets) so I’ll just take a moment to tell you that Janelle Monae’s Dance Apocalyptic and Icona Pop’s I Love It (ft Charli XCX) are epochal songs that deserve space in your playlists. Absolutely incredible, both of them; uplifting, electrifying pop music. I cut others – the soaring Sign of the Times from Harry Styles, a true redemption for a singer I have loathed since the first One Direction single was reviewed here. Kiss and Not Tell by La Roux, because while excellent it’s more of an album track and I’m not here for that. Sia’s Cheap Thrills made a beautiful argument for the existence of Sean Paul and only just REALLY ONLY JUST, like halfway through writing JUST, got bumped because, well, I don’t know, but I could only take seven. We Are Young by Fun., (again, there is Janelle Monae) teeters on the edge of perfection even as I have to admit it didn’t define the way I feel about the last seven years as the following tracks did. Also – check out Daft Punk’s new single “Get Lucky” if you get the chance. Sound of the Summer.

So, with these and others screaming back through the stratosphere, let’s examine the contents of the Command Module.

Nicola Roberts – Beat of My Drum

This is a golden thread leading back to Girls Aloud, the greatest band ever to stalk the planet DO NOT @ ME. The best fit for songwriting powerhouse Xenomania’s all-in approach to pop, GA were untouchably brilliant at their height. All other girl bands now stand in their shadow I SAID DO NOT @ ME. Sadly, when MostlyFilm first rumbled to life, Girls Aloud were nowhere to be seen. So what was there?

Beat of my Drum came out during their three-year hiatus (which was broken only to release an average single*, tour a bit, then break up), and was the first and maybe last to really capture the spirit of the band; the restless invention, the forceful hooks, the awkward rush of joy every new twist brings. It comes at you like a punch; defiantly high energy, a background player stepping to the front. When it drops a fake ending, it comes back so hard the sound blows out, higher frequencies fluttering like a butterfly’s wing. One of the first songs that really energised me while writing Mostly Pop, and it still gets to me when it turns up on a playlist, it’s a flat-out brilliant tune and Roberts never followed it up with anything half as good. Indeed, she never even managed a second album, though we live in hope.

*Average for The Aloud being spectacularly good, ofc, but still.

M I A – Bad Girls

This has grown and grown since 2012. When I first heard it I was taken with it but was it as great as Paper Planes? Cause Paper Planes is one of the few songs that I never ever skip. It’s unskippable. That’s just a simple fact. There’s a bunch of remixes with guests doing the verses and stuff, you should definitely listen to them if you’ve listened to and enjoyed Paper Planes, ok thanks for coming to my TED talk. OH WOW imagine me doing a TED talk. I don’t know anything about bears.

Anyway, Bad Girls. Blimey. What a song. The swirling, always-ready-for-a-fadeout backdrop fuses the old 90s chestnut of “World music” with MIA’s drawling art-pop hip-hop style to near-perfect effect. Lyrically it’s absolute filth, of course, but that’s the secret of pop music, isn’t it? If they’re not explicitly about just taking drugs and having a lovely nap, they’re pretty songs about fucking*. This makes no attempt to hide it, and is absolutely a better song for it. If you’re going to celebrate being a “bad girl”, fucking go for it. Kick hard at the expectation to be a “good girl”, take no prisoners and leave no doubt. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution of course, but that’s not the point, is it? If it was, it’d just be another mould to fit into.

This extends to the music video. Shot in Morocco, presumably because that was way easier, it’s a statement of solidarity with the women to drive movement in Saudi Arabia, which won a significant recent victory in that women will soon (soon! Not even NOW, but SOON) be issued driving licenses. The video also contains a series of badass stunts and some fancy driving skills, in case that sounded a bit worthy. It’s… it’s not dull.

*My second choice for the name of this column was “Pretty Songs About Fucking”, just so you know.

Azealia Banks – Yung Rapunxel

Real talk – Azealia Banks is a fuck-up and we should all feel bad for liking her music. But, like, Dave Grohl, maybe, has never had years-long Twitter beeves that got him banned for life from every Wetherspoons in the country or whatever, and Foo Fighters are dull as shit so fuck it. This kicks hard, and is basically the song that had the most immediate impact on me of all the, god, hundreds of songs I listened to for this damned column. I vividly remember sitting at the computer after it finished and just exclaiming “What the fuck was that?” Let’s play it again and re-live the experience.

Yyyyyyeah, still uncomfortable, dazzling, confounding. You can barely hear the lyrics, but you know they’re not polite and they’re not safe for work. The tune plucks at you, then vanishes in a haze, a gossamer ribbon of razor wire caught in a breeze. A shimmer of the earlier 212 passes by, like a tune on a car stereo in a distant street. Mainly, though, the feeling is of disorientation and flat-out terror. This is music as a haunted house, a ghost train ride. Four years on and I’m still not sure what to make of it. If Banks does make a comeback – and many, many worse people do – let’s hope she remembers how to do this.

Justin Timberlake – Mirrors

Further real talk – Justin Timberlake is a trash human and… look, let’s get this out of the way, there are no good people in pop. OK? They’re not there. Pop music is made by arseholes for more money than is reasonably justifiable, which they then gamble away on cockfighting or whatever. Let’s try to separate the art from the artist, unless they actually bring it in to the music. In which case, Morrissey, we can ditch them like a cross-section of Lincolnshire. Yeah, they should do better but they don’t so we have to make a choice.

So now let’s talk about Mirrors, cause it’s kind of special. JT’s best stuff has always been his 7-minute switchback rides like this. He started it on Futuresex-Lovesounds, his terribly-named but very good second album and it was showcased best right here, in an outstanding track from the otherwise rather tedious product of contractual obligation The 20/20 Experience.

It’s not simply that it shifts into a different song entirely, mid-way through. It’s not simply that both songs are tender and sweet, open-hearted love songs. It’s not simply that the second half of the song illuminates the first half, melodically and thematically. It’s all that, and just god damn it, it’s catchy as fuck. A monumental song, somehow.

Taylor Swift – Blank Space

Again, I don’t care, leave me alone. As far as I can tell, where Azealia Banks says too much, Taylor Swift says too little and in silence is complicity? Is that it?? What do we want from our pop stars??? GOOD MUSIC?????

Well I do, anyway, and 1989 (the album, not… not the year… I was 12, what did I know about good music?) is a good place to look for it. I hadn’t really been interested in albums for a while by this point. Why bother, when there are so many good singles around? It was an article of faith for me that if a song wasn’t good enough to be a single it wasn’t good enough. This is why, to loop back to the beginning a bit, the best Girls Aloud album is GENUINELY their Best of, because it has all the singles. I realise this is Accidental Partridge, but it has the benefit of being completely factual. Which is a long way round to say that this changed my mind. I am perfectly aware that I was caught in a hype bubble, but it worked and it got me listening to the album as a whole, appreciating the quieter, “lesser” tracks, ones that could never make a single.

So why Blank Space? It wasn’t the first track I heard from the album, but it was the one that really showed to me that the album might be something special. Yeah, yeah, some obvious Max Martin tricks in the production but it stands in its own as a soaring, triumphant kiss blown from on high at gossip-mongers (they’re like fishmongers? But instead of fish – gossip!) and, ugh don’t make me say “haters” it’s 2018 fgs. It’s a beauty of a song, filled with hooks and extremely quotable, backed with a classy video and tied up with a “being in exactly the right place at the right time” bow.

Nadia Rose – Skwod

Hey, I don’t think I have to caveat Nadia Rose at all, I reckon she’s pretty sound. Neat-o. Now the obvious choice here might be her cousin, fully-formed star of the second coming of Grime, one Mr Stormzy. In fairness Big For Your Boots is an absolute monster of a track and there was that Brits performance and all that, but despite making less impact, Skwod is the more persistent tune. I mean, it helps that it is primo earworm material doesn’t it? That’s always a good sign for a song that will stay with you. It’s also bursting, perhaps overflowing, with personality.

A zig-zag musical bed lets Nadia Rose unspool her lyrics at a pace that suits her – sometimes lazily, sometimes frenetically, but never letting the tempo get away from her. This is an exercise in control; slyly fun, swaggeringly menacing, charmingly goofy. And – ok, I think there is a slight cheat part way through – basically a one-take video! YES MY FAVOURITE GENRE OF VIDEO GETS (kind of) INTO MY LAST POST, FUCKING AWESOME.

Lorde – Perfect Places

And here we are at the end of all things. It is, duh, impossible to say if this will stick with me like the other songs here but it’s a good bet. I reviewed this in what was an exceptionally good month for pop, and for Mostly Pop. It sat alongside Charli XCX’s Boys and Selena Gomez’s Bad Liar, either of which could have been here in Lorde’s place (and, if this piece had been written two weeks, two months, two minutes earlier or later, maybe they would have been). I picked Perfect Places because it seemed to me like an artist on the way to something huge. It’s such a considered, contained song. It signals ambition and vision in a way the other two did not, not quite.

Also, in short, it bangs. A pretty song about both fucking and taking loads of drugs and having a lovely nap. Starts quietly, then at exactly the one minute mark there is a pause for breath, a rapid tch-tch, then the chorus swoops down on the listener in all its hazy-Sunday glory. I recognise here that I have made it very clear that I am a sucker for stops and starts in songs, for grand changes, for switchbacks and trip-ups. And yeah, I am. But that’s been this column all along, hasn’t it? Me falling for a small bag of tricks, over and over.

And getting annoyed by One Direction. In meaner moments I feel that I should have done my seven least favourite songs, because the real pleasure in all this has been in ripping up and stomping on terrible things, but that might have been an indulgence too far for my editor.

For the record, though:
7. Superlove – Don Broco
6. Don’t Judge Me – Chris Brown
5. Good Intentions – Dappy
4. What Makes You Beautiful – One Direction
3. We Own the Night – The Wanted
2. Sweatshirt – Jacob Sartorious
1. Rude – Magic!

Not gonna link, even. Never listen to those songs. Avoid bad songs entirely, for the matter of that. Never punish yourself with music you feel you should like. It’s not good for you, you don’t get brownie points in the afterlife. Music is an indulgence, a pleasure. Love music, people. Even if it’s just for 3 minutes at a time, it can make you fly. It can take you into space. See you on the next planet over.

The problem with adapting a book for the big screen is that you are always going to have to leave some stuff out. Take E L James’ final instalment in the Fifty Shades trilogy Fifty Shades Freed. The book is 60% BDSM-y sex, 35% Christian Grey acting like a knobhead and about 5% some poorly thought out plot involving a Bad Man, foiled kidnap attempts, arson and stuff.

E L James really shouldn’t try to write plot. She’s terrible at it. However, she can put together a sex scene reasonably well (or if not well, then at least copiously and frequently) so it doesn’t matter. Nobody is reading these books for the sub-par thriller plotline. One imagines that Fifty Shades readers are looking to get their thrills in another way.

Or at least that’s what I think. Director of Fifty Shades Freed, James Foley clearly disagrees, given that he’s taken the directorial decision to jettison most of the kinky sex and substantially tone down Christian’s knobheadedness. “What I really need to focus on here is the car chases and murder attempts,” he obviously told himself. “That’s what the public wants. This isn’t kinky soft-core pornography!”

And that’s the first of many problems with this film. It isn’t soft-core porn. It should have been but it isn’t. I have absolutely no idea what sort of film Foley thought he was making here.

It isn’t even a film about a woman saving a fucked-up damaged lover with the emotional maturity of a toddler through the power of love and blind acceptance. Because although Grey is a bit of a dick in this film, he is nowhere as bad as the book version who seems to be on a one-man mission to tick every box on the Controlling, Emotionally Abusive, Narcissistic Cuntweasel bingo card.

Ana tolerates it all because her man is so complicated and has issues and she luuuurves him. Apparently love means putting up with furious outbursts, creepy stalking and childish sulking before you kiss and make up and your husband shoves some sex toys up your bottom.

Christian proposed to Ana at the end of the last film, Fifty Shades Darker. This one kicks off with their nuptials and a brace of wedding vows so cheesy, it’s a wonder that neither character broke off part way through and said “What the fuck are we talking about. Hold up, everyone, I’ve just realised I sound like a bit of a twat.” We are treated to a Happy Honeymoon Montage where Ana giggles the same winsome giggle in a number of European tourist hotspots.

After that, well a bunch of stuff happens for an hour and a half. Boobs! Handcuffs! Sex! Peril! Peril Averted! Christian being a dick! More sex! More peril! Car Chase! Post car chase sex in a parking lot! Even though stopping for a shag in a parking lot seems like a poor decision when someone’s chasing you. Not now, you two. Put it away.

All the thriller-y bits are nonsensical. The aims of the Bad Guys during the car chase are rather unclear. Later on, Ana makes a stupendously stupid decision not to involve the security staff whose actual job it is to keep her safe just because the Bad Guy told her not to tell anyone. Your personal security team could have pretended that you hadn’t told them. I’m sure they’ve done this sort of thing before. And everybody bloody turned up anyway so it made not the blindest bit of difference other than compromising two people’s personal safety.

I’m worried I might have earlier made this film sound slightly appealing by saying stuff like ‘Boobs!’ and ‘Sex!’ but honestly, it’s not anything like as much fun as it might have been. For a start, there’s no spanking at all in this film. I may have moaned (not in a good way) about the four paltry smacks on Ana’s bottom in the last film but that was a full-on spanking marathon compared to what’s on offer here. So the film didn’t even have that to redeem it. Even Rita Ora failed to win me over this time.

Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan are fine. And by fine, I mean they’re there. Being involved with the Fifty Shades franchise can’t be doing either of their professional reputations much good. So it’s nice that they stuck with it to the end. Well done both of them for bothering to turn up for work. I hope Johnson and Dornan appreciate how very low I am setting the bar here.

At the end of the film we are treated to a “Fifty Shades Films: The Best Bits” montage as Ana fondly looks back over the time she’s spent with Christian. This was an opportunity for us, the viewer to also fondly remember what we’ve all been through together on our special journey through three mediocre pointless films. So, yeah, thanks for the reminder that I could have been doing something so much better with my time, Foley.

But at least we know it’s all over now. (Unless anyone decides to make films of the Christian-focused retellings of the Fifty Shades stories. I can’t imagine why anybody would but then I have no idea why E L James wrote them in the first place so what do I know?)

It’s the end of an era. Christian and Ana are all married and be-babied and living happily ever after. James Dornan can hang up his flogger. Dakota Johnson can put her knickers back on and stop looking so damn winsome about everything.

The obvious thing to do here would be to make the comparison between the end of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy and the end of Mostly Film. But we know that would be a stupid comparison to make.

Fifty Shades Freed was dull and disappointing. Mostly Film is brilliant, often hilarious, frequently thought-provoking and, unlike the Fifty Shades films, made the world a slightly more awesome place. I feel privileged to have made some small contribution to this website over the years. I’ll miss it.

And of course it goes without saying that Mostly Film is hell of a lot sexier than Christian Grey could ever hope to be.

Nicer arse too.

“I hope the title’s the only thing you’re copying from Joss Whedon,” said The Belated Birthday Girl to me, ominously.

The passage of time is an odd thing, isn’t it?  And to be fair, it’s an idea that Whedon exploited ingeniously in the structure of his 2009 show Dollhouse. Most of its episodes centred around a corporation which used creepy technology to temporarily reprogramme human beings for numerous dodgy purposes, effectively making it a hypersexualised Joe 90. But in the two season finales the show managed before cancellation – titled Epitaph 1 and Epitaph 2 – the story flashed forward a decade or so, to a point where this very technology had literally brought about the end of civilisation as we know it.

So, let’s make this a season finale. And let’s flash forward to the several occasions where, some time after struggling to understand a subtitled movie, I got to watch it again with subtitles. (For the purposes of structure, let’s say that the exact value of ‘several’ is ‘seven’.) How close was my original guess at the plot? What did I miss? What did I get completely wrong? Let’s find out together, shall we?

New Kids Nitro (reviewed in The Dutch Angle, January 2012)

We’ll start with the first MMC film I ever reviewed for MostlyFilm. I enjoyed the violent comic energy of its visuals so much that I ended up importing an English-subtitled DVD from Holland some months later. In retrospect, I may have been better off remaining ignorant of the dialogue. Obviously, I wasn’t expecting it to be tasteful: any film which disposes of its zombie antagonists in this fashion is already dealing in industrial levels of wrongness. And sometimes, you can’t help but admire the offensiveness, like the happy ending in which the New Kids are rewarded with a royal decree to “fuck whores and never work again.” (Cue the end titles song, Hoeren Neuken Nooit Meer Werken.) But when (for example) a woman is attacked offscreen with a broom handle, and a casual line of dialogue makes it brutally clear that it’s a sexual assault, that’s a rare example of understanding the language actually making the film less enjoyable.

Kon-Tiki (reviewed in Pining For The Fjords, September 2012)

This is an odd one: a film that I watched subtitled in its country of origin, and unsubtitled back in the UK. To answer a question posed in my original 2012 review, it turns out that most Norwegian films are routinely subtitled in their home country to cover the two forms of the language that exist side by side, Bokmål (“book tongue”) and Nynorsk (“new Norwegian”). Meanwhile, when Kon-Tiki was theatrically released in the UK, it was in a different version from the one I watched in Oslo – the directors literally shot every dialogue scene twice, once in Norwegian for the domestic market and once in English for the rest of the world. Both versions work just fine: to be honest, there isn’t much important detail in the dialogue, although it provides a degree of characterisation which stops you thinking of the crew as six interchangeable guys with beards. Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg subsequently went on to direct Pirates Of The Caribbean: Salazar’s Revenge, which is definitely a progression for them in some direction or other.

Call Girl (reviewed in The Guldbagge Variations, March 2013)

Part of the appeal of Call Girl was always the nostalgia factor: these days, sadly, it’s nostalgia for 2013, a simpler time when ‘politicians should not be sleeping with underage girls’ was an uncontroversial opinion, rather than a hindrance to you getting elected in Alabama. It still amazes me to this day just how much of the main conspiracy plot I picked up on first viewing: maybe political sex scandals are the real international language. The stuff that I picked up later, on the film’s UK release, was largely the deep background – how all of this was happening at a time when Sweden was in the process of decriminalising many sex acts, while the people responsible for the laws were indulging in those acts themselves. Its grim message of how the establishment will always prevail is even more relevant today: the process of young Iris’ gradual grooming into her role is incredibly tough to watch now. What keeps you watching is the tautness of the script’s thriller structure, as well as Mattias Bärjed’s deliciously retro score, which was available on UK iTunes long before the film was.

Qalb al Assad (reviewed in The World, Under Construction, September 2014)

A common thread running through these reviews has been my ongoing struggle to appreciate Arabic cinema. All too often, it seems targeted at the lowest common denominator, particularly when most of the films I watch are crude Egyptian comedies. The one flat-out action thriller I’ve seen from Egypt, it has to be said, was much more entertaining. I subsequently got to see it subtitled as an in-flight movie with Emirates, and it was a fairly similar experience second time round: the broad strokes of the story still comprehensible, the occasional plot holes still less so. Emirates, however, frequently edit films for the mildest sexual content, and even a film like this ended up losing the scene where the heroine is tormented by neck-licking baddies. On the same flight I managed to catch up with another MMC subject, the Swedish thriller Tommy, and that was notable for Lykke Li’s promiscuous character being told in crudely altered subtitles “you need to stop thinking with your bottom.” It’s possible that the Emirates censor might have accidentally provided a bowdlerised translation that’s even ruder than the original.

Men And Chicken (reviewed in The Copenhagen Interpretation, March 2015)

To quote from my original review: “I may have just misread all the signs and come up with an ending that bears no relation at all to [writer/director Anders Thomas Jensen]’s intentions. And if that’s the case, then holy crap I have a film script that I need to start writing…” Well, bad news: that script is not going to be my pension plan, because at the film’s subsequent London Film Festival screening I learned that my guess at what the ending meant was spot on. Mind you, I assumed from the unsubtitled version that the visuals were the most disturbing part of the film, and boy was I wrong about that. But the dialogue isn’t just another ingredient in the gross-out: as with Kon-Tiki, it gives the five brothers distinct characterisation through their personal verbal tics, where previously there were only facial deformities to separate them from each other. It humanises them to an unexpected degree: rather than being figures of fun, there’s a mounting sense of tragedy at what’s been done to them.

Mia Madre (reviewed in Live At Pompeii, July 2015)

I missed Nanni Moretti’s film on its original UK release, but luckily it’s still available on Curzon Home Cinema for a ridiculously cheap £2.50. (Or, if you’re reading this before March 13^th, it’s on the BBC iPlayer for absolutely nothing.) It’s already got a small amount of English dialogue, thanks to its main character Margherita having to deal with an English-speaking actor on the film she’s directing. The subtitles make the movie business satire even sharper, as it becomes clearer that Margherita is just as confused a director in Italian as she is in English. As for the other strand involving Margherita’s dying mother, it’s treated with the pleasing lack of sentimentality you’d expect from Moretti. It’s not quite as unsentimental as I’d originally thought, though – the ‘dark twist’ I mentioned in the review was a complete misinterpretation on my part, as I’d callously assumed that Margherita breaks down at the end because she’s now got to care for her mum at home. Even with subtitles, there’s still no real explanation as to how John Turturro’s actor character keeps behaving so appallingly on set with no apparent consequences. It has to be said, though, that the scene where Turturro claims to have had a nightmare about being attacked by Kevin Spacey plays rather differently now.

Blade Of The Immortal (reviewed in Tales Of Asian Vengeance, May 2017)

I can’t finish with the final film I reviewed in this series – an honour that goes to the inevitably shite Egyptian heist comedy Bank El Haez – but I can at least give you a film that made its debut in UK cinemas as recently as December 2017. As ever, action movies are the ones that work best when stripped of their dialogue, although subtitles did at least clear up my major concern about the film, to whit: how do you maintain suspense when your lead character is immortal? (Answer: you give him anti-immortality poison, which feels like one of those terrible dodges you pull in childhood games. “Well, my gun fires special bulletproof-vest-penetrating bullets, so you’re dead.”) Less surprisingly, the addition of dialogue stops the film being merely an episodic collection of swordfights, and turns it into an actual story.

So, is this the end for Monoglot Movie Club, after six years and thirty-odd posts? Probably not, if we’re honest. After all, there were fourteen MMC style reviews on my own blog before MostlyFilm ever started, so I suspect I’ll still be confusing myself in overseas cinemas for some time to come. MMC may look as if it’s died, but that’s merely for contractual purposes: in reality, it’s just going to transfer over to a less visible platform, and ramble on for a few more years to diminishing returns. I feel that a parallel for this may already exist, but it temporarily escapes me.

Monoglot Movie Club
2012-2018
It Travelled The World
A Lot

Streaming has been good for TV.  It seems that with increased competition, and streaming services still finding their groove and so experimenting in ways that the old guard really haven’t for years, the bar has been raised for everyone. And whilst executives and commentators muse on the need for immediacy that drives binge watching and what it means for the future of drama, I thought I would muse upon the TV highlights of 2017 for me, and perhaps in the process inspire you to discover some shows or performances you have otherwise missed. Please do share your favourite moments in the comments below too.

Women

2017 really was the year that female characters were offered a chance to be more and do more in TV drama – something film will hopefully start to emulate more as executives realise that male and female audiences will watch something if the characters and narratives are strong enough.

Strong female characters have always been there of course, and praised too – in part because they shone out like the rare gems that they were – but in the last year it has been harder to pick outstanding moments because there have been so many of them and long may it last too. However, this is a review of my favourite moments of the year so here are a few that shone brightly for me.

Reese Witherspoon enjoying every moment as the mother you should hate but ended up loving in Big Little Lies. Elizabeth Moss and her expressionful face in The Handmaid’s Tale. Kathryn Hahn as the unlikable, selfish, complex, searching and ultimately beguiling lead in I Love Dick. Emily Browning, Gillian Anderson and Yetide Badaki stealing every scene they graced in American Gods. Ruth Negga owning Preacher, despite her two charismatic co-stars. Krysten Ritter making beautiful tough not brittle in Jessica Jones and reminding me of Robert Mitchum.  Pearl Mackie breathing new life and a freshness that was undeniably all hers to Moffat’s increasingly over-wrought and tiresomely complex Doctor Who. Phoebe Waller-Bridge making real women funny and relatable in Fleabag. Tig Notaro in the always nice One Mississippi. Saffron Burrows’ subtle but strong turn in Mozart in the Jungle. Diane Morgan in Motherland – show me a mum who isn’t inspired by her parenting cheats. And, of course, the stunning Thandie Newton in Line of Duty.

Narrative

It may be my age but I can’t help feeling that an awful lot of films and literature seem to have lost the art of great narrative. As a lover of stories well-told I think this is rather a shame, but thankfully TV has been there to pick up the baton and run with it.

Game of Thrones has been so lauded that it suffers praise fatigue, yet the way that the show has woven multiple narrative threads together and created a geo-political drama in the process, albeit one with dragons and ice zombies, is worthy of praise. Some were disappointed with the latest series, as the makers take the leap from converting the author’s books to developing the narrative themselves that was perhaps unsurprising. Certainly it felt as if there was less action in the series as the many individuals narratives finally collided, bringing the battles that have been threatening to come for so long. But it still sets the gold standard.

American Gods and Twin Peaks were both there to challenge Game of Thrones’ pole position. For the former, I remain unconvinced that the sum is quite adding up as yet to a whole. The pace feels stilted, although not across all segments. Perhaps now the ‘reveal’ has been offered the next series can find a more consistent rhythm? Twin Peaks meanwhile followed the beat of its own drum, reminding all of us who watched the first series all those years ago quite why it had such an impact on TV drama, and showing those who missed it the first time around what ‘challenging’ and ‘character driven’ really means. I can think of few TV moments as powerful and moving as that shared by a mother, a little boy and Harry Dean Stanton – Lynch really is an auteur for whom television offers room to breathe, and if we could see more from him on our screens I would be very happy indeed.

Superheroes/Comic adaptations

Have we reached super saturation point yet? I confess I have. Netflix expanded its Marvel Universe in 2017 by bringing us Luke Cage and Iron Fist, who along with their own outings joined Jessica Jones and Daredevil in The Defenders. They also brought us The Punisher. Meanwhile Amazon continues to support the hugely entertaining Preacher, for my money the most unlikely TV show to be made and recommissioned and an absolute delight – if an ultra-violent, darkly comic and often tasteless one. As well as The Tick, which aims to be lovable, winning, kooky and somewhat satirical – it certainly manages most of these and has the usually supporting Peter Serafinowicz top to tail in skin-tight blue to boot.

Then of course there’s Legion, Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD, the once again entertaining DC Legends of Tomorrow, Arrow, The Flash, Riverdale, Teen Titans, Gotham, Inhumans, Powerless, Lucifer, Supergirl, The Walking Dead, The Gifted and Runaways – have I missed any? Possibly. The trend to super and comic doesn’t appear to be abating so I expect to see even more in 2018, though I confess I’m no longer fan enough to watch them all. But Preacher and Lucifer remain on my unmissable list, and The Tick and Powerless were unexpected delights.

Characters

If The Detectorists isn’t showered with awards for its latest and last season, there is no justice in the TV world. Mackenzie Crook may not be the greatest director on TV (am I the only person who isn’t sure if the past flash backs are intended to be humorous?) but I do hope that The Detectorists won’t prove to be his last foray as a writer and performer. Andy and Lance (Mackenzie and Toby Jones) deserve their place alongside other great TV character duos like Steptoe & Son, Del Boy and Rodney and Arkwright and Granville.  If you have yet to watch the show I suggest starting with episode one of the first series and watching all the way through to the end. The first two seasons can be found on Netflix in the UK at the moment. Once you’ve watched them I’m sure you’ll happily pay to watch the next two on Amazon.

And whilst I found the writing more insulting than not and the plot so ridiculous as to render the show devoid of thrill, I accept that I stand mostly alone in that opinion and it is undeniable that in Doctor Foster, and with the help of star Suranne Jones, TV has found its modern wronged woman. More in charge than Glenn Close’s Alex in Fatal Attraction, yet equally unhinged, men and women found themselves wincing not at boiled pet rabbits on the stove, but dinner party chatter that breached conversational etiquette and British reserve, and spousal baiting designed to alienate children from one parent in favour of another. It was too successful not to be recommissioned and in 2017 season two – revenge of the husband – offered equal opportunity bitterness and spousal loopiness. Perhaps season three will offer their son his turn to chill audiences?

Documentaries

Keepers is a powerful, if unnecessarily long (really you could tell the story in two or three episodes tops) look at child abuse, the Catholic Church, the impact that murder has on a small town and its residents and the slippery nature of memory. Netflix wowed us all with Making a Murderer – Keepers is nowhere near as strong but it still packed a punch.

No matter how strong the streamers are in factual content and documentary series the BBC will remain king whilst Attenborough has a hand in its natural world content. The Blue Planet, once again, had us all spellbound. If you doubt the power of the small screen, just ask anyone who watched it what they think about plastic pollution’s impact on marine life and our oceans – in just a few moments Blue Planet showed how worrying it is for us all, in a relatable way that campaigners have tried for many years to deliver, bringing the issue alive for the media and in so doing grabbing the attention of politicians too.

Gangsters and Bodice rippers

2017 offered viewers more Poldark, with evil sneering George who somehow manages to stop just short of panto villain and the darkly brooding Ross, a man with a brow so furrowed it’s incredible that the lines aren’t permanent. For those less enamoured by windswept cliff sides and dank dark mines with topless toffs digging alongside their common-man counterparts, there was more to choose from. Outlander, the so preposterous it’s brilliant, time travelling love/revenge/Scottish history romp returned to Amazon and is as daft as it has ever been. Harlots had Samantha Morton and equal opportunity nudity, as well as a selection of truly wondrous wigs – the wardrobe department looked like they had a blast, the lighting department too.

Taboo hit screens in 2017 too and divided audiences. For every person who found Tom Hardy’s striking hat at an odd angle wearing returning adventurer James Keziah Delaney magnetic, there was another who found him tough to fathom and fast gave up trying. Personally I’m rather enjoying Tom Hardy’s experiment with ‘historical’ television drama. His Alfie Solomons in Peaky Blinders went from somewhat grating to best character in it – bar Cillian Murphy’s Thomas Shelby. And speaking of Peaky Blinders, my what a blast that last season was. After the third season, with its coke snorting, hard partying Brummy boys meets bright young things and corrupt homeless Russian aristocracy with Finnian uprising side-plot, I thought the show had lost its edge. Where, I wondered, could it possibly go next if not further down?

How wrong I was. Season four is where Peaky Blinders has found its pacing. In the sublimely ridiculous street gun battle between Brum native Shelby and American gangster Luca Changretta (Adrien Brody hamming it up more than Aidan Gillan as a gypsy; now there’s something you don’t get to see every day), in the Birmingham slums between the hanging bed sheets, I found myself grinning with delight. This is ambition. This is British drama taking on American tropes with true gusto. It is bold, brave and brilliant and I would like more please, not least because I’d miss the show’s lingering gaze upon the face of Cillian Murphy and many renditions of Nick Cave’s Red Right Hand (Jarvis Cocker and Iggy Pop’s version was this season’s best I think).

Happy

Is enough time dedicated to TV that brings a smile to your face and just makes you happy? I’m not sure it does, so let me share with you the show’s that did that for me in 2017. The Detectorists I’ve covered, but mention again because rarely do characters prove such a tonic for viewers – truly a delight and one I won’t spoil for anyone yet to watch it, those who have know what I’m talking about. But whilst The Detectorists were an old friend as it were, new to me this year was the wonderful The Good Place. Season one seemed to have passed many people by, but those who watched it loved it and word spread. The show that takes Kristen Bell to heaven as an interloper and casts Ted Danson as an ancient and omnipotent being struggling with mishap and mayhem may not sound like your thing, but I defy you to watch three episodes and not fall in love with it. Season two manages the not inconsiderable feat of being even more fun than the first.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt also returned to Netflix last year, and whilst I confess that this series had more duffs than hits for me, it still made me smile throughout. There’s something to be celebrated in a central character so annoyingly likable that the rogues around her are redeemed just by seeing themselves through her eyes. Plus, the Lemonade skit sequence really was a comedy highlight.

The USA is very good at character driven ‘friends’ light situational comedies, the UK less so: yet The Detectorists (sorry another plug) and The Trip with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon prove that the Brits, when they get it right, get it very very right indeed. The Trip, to Spain this time, moved homes in 2017, from the BBC to Sky Atlantic – which is an indication of the impact that Government cuts and meddling are having on the British people’s broadcasting company (see also Bake Off).  Coogan has said that he loves the way that some viewers forget that this is a drama, not a documentary. But the fun of The Trip is believing you are a fly on the wall and that these two men really do spend their time trying to out-impression each other and sharing each other’s midlife, male dramas that smack of nothing but foolishness, on their part I might add. It also comes with food porn of course and stunning scenery, what more could one ask for?

Well how about the restoration of your faith in humanity? Yes of course I’m talking about the Bake Off!  By moving to Channel 4 for money, leaving the BBC that had invested time slots and good cash to help build it into the behemoth that it had become, viewers were angry and the much loved presenters all left – bar blue eyed Paul who was, the internet agreed, all about the money. Maybe he was, but the format is simple yet strong enough to survive even the angriest of viewers and Noel Fielding is surely the most unlikely lovely baking show host TV has produced yet. Experiencing the comradery and friendship that the Bake Off tent seemingly engenders works even with ad breaks and Liam was, even if we viewers couldn’t taste his bakes, clearly cheated of a place in the final.

What were your TV highlights of 2017? Doctor Who? Black Mirror? The League of Gentlemen’s return? Lucifer? Godless? JK Rowling’s Cormoran Strike brought to life? French & Saunders’ return?  Share with us, we’d love to know.