Sinners or One Battle: what can we learn from this year’s anonymous Oscar ballots?

While Academy voters are supposed to keep their picks secret, another batch of anonymous ballots have leaked – giving us some insight on a hard-to-call race Oscars 2026: how to watch, nominations, what to read and predictions It took a great deal of blood, sweat and tweets, but in 2016 the Academy finally took notice and started to embrace both diversity and modernity. The # OscarsSoWhite furore over two straight years of all-white nominees (Michael B Jordan’s Creed snub was in my opinion the cruelest) led to a dramatic shake-up and one that has continued ever since with more women, people of colour and international voters added to what had been an overwhelmingly homogenous base. It has all led to an Oscars race that is increasingly harder to predict using old-fashioned thinking in ways that have become rather thrilling over time, the idea of an “Oscar movie” now far more slippery. Films such as Parasite, Anora, Moonlight, Anatomy of a Fall, Nomadland, Get Out and The Zone ...

Jules review – Ben Kingsley helps an alien in likably folksy twist on ET

As a widower with dementia, no one believes a UFO has crashed in Milton’s back yard or that he’s caring for an extraterrestrial – until his neighbours find out

Screenwriter Gavin Steckler and director Marc Turtletaub have given us this goofy, likable new twist on ET. In the Mathison/Spielberg classic from 1982, the visiting extraterrestrial found safety within the secret world of children, whose existence is beneath the grownups’ notice. Now the space alien finds himself protected by old people, who are used to being patronised and ignored.

Chief among the alien’s allies is Milton, played by Ben Kingsley, an ageing widower in whose back garden his spaceship crash-lands, and who, with instinctive neighbourly kindness, welcomes the mute, hairless naked interplanetary creature into his house. Milton has dementia, and so when he tells locals that he is having to get extra food in for the alien, no one pays much attention other than to relay this apparently sad and upsetting news to Milton’s grownup daughter Denise (played by Zoë Winters, who plays Logan Roy’s assistant and mistress Kerry in TV’s Succession). The scene in which Milton fails the dementia test in the doctor’s office is genuinely sweet and sad due to the fact that it could have taken place in an entirely different, serious film.

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