Why F1 the Movie should win the best picture Oscar

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It may not be in pole position, but Brad Pitt and director Joseph Kosinski’s sleek, technically inventive ode to motor racing definitely qualifies for the Academy podium Could, should, would F1 the Movie win the best picture Oscar? Well, we have to be realistic here: F1 is currently a massive outsider, at 200-1 along with The Secret Agent , which has no chance either but for very different reasons. It’s not hard to see why: this is a swaggeringly mainstream film, where tech and branding dwarf the human input, with the film itself acting as a front-end battering ram for a sports organisation desperate to break into the promised land of the US auto racing circuit. (I mean it’s right there in the title.) So even the most reactionary, conservative Academy voter is going to find it hard to mark F1 with their tick. So no, I don’t think it could win. That’s not to say F1 doesn’t have quite a bit going for it. The Oscars, as we know, have historically had a problem with so-called “popular” ...
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Cats of Malta review – purr-inducing documentary aims to encourage compassion

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Interviewing the humans who help strays in their Maltese neighbourhood, this is a hazy but enjoyable slice of life with cats

Social media, for all its sins, has achieved at least one thing in this crazy, mixed-up world: it’s raised everyone’s game when it comes to cat videos. What artist Louis Wain did for cat illustration in the 19th century, YouTube, Instagram and TikTok have done for our feline friends in the 21st, celebrating their strangeness, comic absurdity, and capacity for grumpiness. Meanwhile, there’s a growing genre of documentary films about cats and their relationship with humans, some of which add to the cat-people Venn-diagram-overlap an extra subset concerned with specific places, such as the magnificent Kedi, which profiled the street cats of Istanbul and their human friends.

Cats of Malta, as its unambiguous title suggests, wants to do for Malta what Kedi did for Istanbul. It celebrates these very territorial creatures that share the streets of ancient neighbourhoods, with their history recounted by director Sarah Jayne’s voiceover. The cats are mostly unconcerned with the human residents except when they have needs to be met, such as hunger or medical emergencies. And so we get stories told straight to camera by kindly humans who had to help when, for example, an aggressive kick by a passing dog owner ended up costing one tom a front leg. Another person created a little cat village next to a historic stretch of wall built by the Knights Templar – a lovely conjunction of antiquity and super-tacky plastic cat shelters – but was forced to take it down by developers with plans for the site. Many of the humans, including the cat-village builder, English-Maltese actor Polly Marsh and 13-year-old natural comic Isaac Muscat, voluntarily spend huge chunks of their free time feeding the cats. They also, when possible, trap them so that they can be neutered or spayed, thus reducing the feral population.

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