Oscar nominations 2015: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

THE GOOD

1. Birdman and The Grand Budapest Hotel receiving nine nominations each is thoroughly well deserved, as are the six for Boyhood. Any one of them would be a worthy best picture winner.

2. Ida (Poland) and Two Days, One Night (Belgium) both escaping the shackles of the foreign language category to land noms for best cinematography and best actress (Marion Cotillard) respectively.

3. The Boxtrolls – one of the most eccentric and grotesque kids’ films I’ve ever seen – making it into the best animated feature category.

4. Emma Stone’s reaction to her supporting actress nod for Birdman. “I am so fucking excited,” she said in a statement. Are you allowed to say fuck when you're making a statement for the Oscars? I’m just really fucking excited.” It makes a nice change from all that “honoured and humbled” nonsense.

5. Meryl Streep receiving a 19^th career Oscar nomination (best supporting actress for Into the Woods) is an extraordinary achievement. My money’s firmly on Patricia Arquette (for Boyhood) though.

THE BAD

1. The nomination of American Sniper as best picture. Clint Eastwood’s film has its moments and Bradley Cooper and Sienna Miller turn in career-best performances, but it is in no way one of the best eight pictures of the past year. Foxcatcher, for instance, pisses on it from a great height.

2. The shocking absence of The Lego Movie in the animated category has to be one of the most egregious snubs in years. At least the film’s director has a sense of humour about it.

3. Only one nom for the extraordinary and caustic Nightcrawler (best original screenplay). At the very least, Jake Gyllenhaal should have copped a best actor nod.
4. Not a single mention in any category for Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin – even Mica Levi’s head-spinning soundtrack was snubbed.

5. The fact so many of the nominated films still haven't opened in the UK. We’re yet to see the likes of Selma, Wild, and Still Alice, while Whiplash only opened today. And the movie industry wonders why piracy is still so prevalent…

…AND THE UGLY

1. A frightening lack of ethnic and gender diversity in the acting, writing and directing categories. Apparently, it's the first time since 1998 that all the nominees in each of the four main acting categories is white. But what do you expect when Oscar voters are 94 per cent white, 77 per cent male and only 14 per cent are under the age of 50? Perhaps the Academy thinks it filled its “quota” last year by rewarding 12 Years a Slave and Lupita Nyong’o.

TV movie picks (UK): Monday, January 12 - Sunday, January 18

Instead of having a life, why not watch all the great films on telly this week? Here's a few of them...

TERRESTRIAL: Has there ever been a more convincing movie psychopath than Andy Robinson's Scorpio in Dirty Harry (Wednesday, ITV4, 23:20)? He's absolutely, spectacularly, gloriously deranged, and apparently received death threats after the movie was released. The scene in which he forces the terrified kids on the bus to sing "Row, row, row your boat" hasn't lost any of its power to shock 43 years on. Go on, take a look...

Magnum Force, Clint Eastwood's second outing as San Francisco police inspector Harry Callahan, follows on Friday (ITV4, 21:00). A pre-Hutch David Soul stars in that one as a rogue cop. My favourite scene is where Clint invites him round for a cup of herbal tea and a spot of couscous so they can both explore their feelings. It seems to me Sacha Baron Cohen has spent the last few years resting on his laurels - a misfiring comedy here (The Dictator), voice work on a kids' movie there (Madagascar 3). But Borat: Cultural Learnings of America Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Friday, Channel 4, 00.30) showcases the former Ali G at the absolute top of his game, as the titular character travels to the States in a bid to make Pamela Anderson his wife. Filthy and fearless, it's probably the funniest Hollywood comedy of the last decade (like that would be difficult). Great success!

CABLE & SATELLITE: There's a late-night samurai double bill on Film 4 on Friday. First up at 23:10 is blood-drenched revenge flick Shogun Assassin. It's a funny old Frankenstein of a film, being two episodes of the original Japanese Baby Cart series spliced together and dubbed into English. Don't let that put you off though, it's great fun. Even better is Akira Kurosawa's classic Yojimbo (00:55) starring the great Toshiro Mifune as a crafty ronin manipulating two rival gangsters to protect a small town. I used to know someone who'd never seen the film and thought it was called "Yo Jimbo", as in "Yo Jimbo, what time you off to the shops?". Hmm, maybe you had to be there...

The Grand Budapest Hotel won a Golden Globe last night for best musical or comedy and you can still catch it on Sky Premiere this week (Monday-Thursday, 20:00). If you've already seen it or Wes Anderson wackiness isn't your thing, set the PVR for Harmony Korine's hallucinatory and extraordinary Spring Breakers (Wednesday, Sky Select, 02:50), or the moving and life-affirming The Sessions (tonight, Sky Drama, 23:50). Helen Hunt should have won the Oscar in 2012 for her portrayal of a sex therapist treating a journalist left bed ridden by childhood polio.

VOD: New to View On Demand (Virgin Movies, BT TV, Sky Store etc) this week is Leviathan, a Russian film so bleak it makes Les Miserables look like an episode of Russ Abbot's Madhouse (one of the good ones where he does Cooperman). I thought the first hour was great before its unrelenting oppressiveness became too much even for me. I should make an attempt to see it again because it's on a lot of critics' top 10 lists for 2014 but, frankly, life's too short and I'm in a happy place right now. Rather more jolly is Lucy in which drug-mule Scarlett Johansson accidentally ingests a substance which enables her to harness 100 per cent of her brain's potential... and kill lots of people. I'm guessing that if Scarlett could really turn up her brain function to 11 she wouldn't have done those buttock-clenching TV ads for Dolce & Gabbana, with Matthew McConaughey.

TV movie picks (UK): Monday, January 5 - Sunday, January 11

Any good films on the telly this week? Why yes, please permit me to suggest a few you might find agreeable...

TERRESTRIAL: Forest Whitaker is terrific as a "zen hitman" in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Channel 4, Wednesday,12.30am). For anyone who has only seen last year's Only Lovers Left Alive and now wants to check out more of director Jim Jarmusch's work, it's a perfect place to start. ITV are showing Bond 23 - aka Skyfall - on Saturday (9pm) but will almost certainly desecrate it with innumerable ad breaks and trailers for Take Me Out. If you're a connoisseur of drivel or just really hate yourself, you should definitely check out The Medallion (Channel 5, Sunday, 9pm). Jackie Chan, Julian Sands and Claire Forlani are all hunting for an ancient artefact with mystical powers or something. So bad it'd make Satan weep pitch-black tears of purest despair.

CABLE & SATELLITE: Two crackers make their debut on Sky Premiere this Friday. Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel (showing 10.15am and 8pm) is last year's finest film comedy (yes, even funnier than Sex Tape), while Starred Up (10pm and 1.35am) is a rough and rowdy British prison drama starring Unbroken's Jack O'Connell. Before that, on Wednesday night, Film 4 serves up a Brendan Gleeson double bill of The Guard (9pm) and In Bruges (10.55pm). They, too, are somewhat funnier than Sex Tape.

VOD: Enemy, starring Jake Gyllenhaal and, erm, Jake Gyllenhaal, has just opened in cinemas but can also be found on View On Demand (Virgin Movies, Curzon Home Cinema, Sky Store etc). I'll be reviewing the film here later in the week. Debuting on Amazon Prime Video this Saturday is director Steve McQueen's 12 Years A Slave. Great script, terrific cast, stunning cinematography, and a story so harrowing it'll take you a while to process it all. McQueen is a truly fearless filmmaker and his triple Oscar winner deserved every plaudit and award it got. Horror of a different kind is provided by Byzantium (Amazon Prime Video, from Friday), a superior, slow-burning vampire film directed by Neil 'The Crying Game' Jordan, and starring Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan as mother and daughter blood-suckers. It's bloody good, he said in a rather pathetic attempt at ending this column on a pun like what proper writers do.

The best of 2014 part three

Numbers 5 to 2 in my 25 favourite films of the year...

5. Nightcrawler (Dan Gilroy)

A no-holds-barred satire on the American Dream every bit as scabrous and vituperative as Cronenberg’s Maps to the Stars. Jake Gyllenhaal has never been better as TV crime reporter Lou Bloom, a perfect anti-hero for our times; rapaciously greedy, weirdly antisocial and thoroughly amoral. The fact it has been mentioned in the same breath as classics such as Network, Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy says it all really.

4. Inside Llewyn Davis (Joel Cohen & Ethan Cohen)

I love films that hold their nerve and don't sell out their characters and story with cheap, uplifting endings designed to send audiences home with a soppy collective smile. Thankfully, the Coens can always be relied upon to deliver perfect denouements and so they do again, in a sublime comedy/drama that is as much a celebration of their titular folk musician's failure as it is a rumination on it. Brilliant music, too.

3. Ida (Pawel Pawlikowski)

Beautiful, haunting Polish drama about a young noviciate (novice nun) discovering everything she thought she knew about her life was wrong. What unfolds is a revelatory, heartbreaking road trip into the Holocaust's heart of darkness. Only one criticism: at 82 minutes, it's too short - I wanted more of the characters (especially Ida's haunted alcoholic aunt), more of the stunning cinematography and more of a story that had me gripped from its first minute.

2. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson)

A sad, funny, gorgeous-looking piece of work with a fantastic performance from Ralph Fiennes as the extraordinary Gustave H. Yes, it's quirky, silly and positively surreal at times but it's also never less than thoroughly charming. My favourite Wes Anderson film... until the next one.

Come back later today when I reveal my favourite film of the year...