Why F1 the Movie should win the best picture Oscar

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” ...

End of Term review – art-school horror is fusion of slasher and country-house whodunnit

Weird goings-on in a basement lead to Cluedo-ish suspects and piecemeal flashbacks, but here it is the audience that suffers in the name of art

‘So, you call yourself conceptualists, do you?” says the straight-arrow detective quizzing Melissa (Chelsea Edge), a cool-customer art student with three long lacerations on her face. “Mostly. Ashley wasn’t,” Melissa replies. “Unless anti-conceptualism is a concept. She was always about being in the moment. Expressionism. Impressionism.” End of Term has a fondness for bandying around the art-theory big talk, but this silly but stolidly genre project could sorely use a conceptual cutting edge itself.

Melissa is getting questioned after being found strapped to a chair in the blood-splattered basement of Ford Barrington art school. Strangely, there are no bodies – except for that of snooty art critic Damian Self (Ronald Pickup) in the nearby space for the students’ end-of-term exhibition. In Usual Suspects-style piecemeal flashbacks, Melissa fills in the police on the buildup to the butchery and the halls of residence gallery of Cluedo-ish suspects, including her vampish one-time lover Ashley (Nicole Posener), the suave Professor Leigh (Peter Davison, a former Doctor in Doctor Who), and wild card Garth Stroman (Ivan Kaye), a rumoured ghost of a Byronic artist obsessed with a credo that art must involve pain.

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