Right now many of us just want to escape – escape from the news about Ukraine and escape from the unpleasant reality that is surrounding us if only for an hour or two. Fortunately help is at hand.
As the hype begins for the Oscars and the British Academy Film and Television Awards – or Bafta – there is some good news. The world's filmmakers have come up with something for everyone. As one of the Bafta voting members, I have had the great privilege of escaping into the dozens of movies that may win awards. The good news is that the standard is so high this year that it is almost impossible to decide who should win what.
How can you choose between the latest multi-million-dollar Bond offering No Time To Die and a very lovely low-budget Norwegian film about a woman in search of love, The Worst Person in the World? I enjoyed the Bond movie, but that Norwegian film has stayed with me, especially the big star of the future, Renate Reinsve, who plays the central character. Then there is the majestic The Power of the Dog, which has received many nominations, including for Benedict Cumberbatch as best actor and best director for Jane Campion.
The almost all-male club at the Oscars, especially for directors, has been broken. Women directors and people of colour are, this year, generally better represented in some of the best-funded films, but the judges' job is made more difficult by another type of diversity. There is an astonishing (and welcome) creative diversity in the films on offer.
Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch is as cheerful and crazy a film as Anderson fans have come to expect; maybe more crazy. Then there is Nicholas Cage in a film called Pig, which is extraordinary in another way. You can sum up the plot in two sentences. A man – played by Cage – lives in the woods of North America with a valuable pig, until the pig is stolen. He tries to find it. That's it. Yet, despite my unpromising plot summary, the film and the performance by Cage are definitely worth a look.
But there are, as always, a few films that make me wonder how on earth someone came up with the idea.
The House of Gucci – about the world-famous fashion house family – is an interesting story with a stunning cast including Lady Gaga, Al Pacino, Jeremy Irons and Salma Hayek plus a great director, Ridley Scott. Yet, someone, somewhere, took the decision to make all the actors speak English with laughable Italian accents. When you read reviews that go on about the accents rather than the story or the performances, you know the movie has misfired badly.
But one other escape, for me at least, was to discover so many superb movies directed at children and which touch – with humour – some of the big serious issues of the day. Encanto, Luca, The Mitchells v The Machines, Ron's Gone Wrong, and others, are all stories about people who in one way or another don't quite fit in because they are different. Some of these films also address, in a way any 10-year-old can understand, the dangers of artificial intelligence and Big Tech companies who treat consumers − you and me − as commodities.
The real winners at this year's awards season are, therefore, not just the stars, the directors and the studios. The big winners are us, the audiences, looking for escape for an hour or two. If you can't find something that excites you or touches your heart or makes you think at this year's Oscars and Baftas, then it is not the directors or the studios' fault.
And that brings me to a film that touched me directly because I endured some of the consequences of what that film is about. It's Belfast, directed by Kenneth Branagh.
It's the story of a family in that city in Northern Ireland at the start of what were known as The Troubles, the sectarian killings and violence between Protestants and Catholics that caught fire in 1969 and continued for 30 or so years. The premise of the film is straightforward. A small boy – Branagh himself, reimagined – is bewildered by the tension and the violence provoked by some of the adults around him. The boy is a Protestant. He lives alongside Catholics. Suddenly the violence begins. The two tribes are forced to separate, or in the case of the boy's family, to decide whether to get out of Northern Ireland. Branagh's own family did so, and settled in England.
I am watching this film about visceral hatred, while on the other side of Europe, families in Ukraine are being split up by violence that is as incomprehensible to me as the violence of the 1970s was to the young Branagh. And that's why I love the movies. They are a way of escaping from the world. But they are also a way of making sense of it.
