Movie watching

I’m both an Oscars voter and a BAFTA voter, so this is the season when I watch a ridiculous number of films in a short space of time. I go to the Picture House in Uckfield, or to industry screenings in London, or sit on our giant sofa with members of my family, and enrage them by predicting the plots as the films unfold; and then when it’s over by pointing out all the ways the film could have been better. I try not to do this, I really do, as I should, given my own fallible record. But so far this does not seem to be a vintage year. I’ve been moved by ‘Boyhood’, (more potent about motherhood than boyhood), mesmerised by ‘Maps to the Stars’, and deeply impressed by Eddie Redmayne’s performance in ‘The Theory of Everything’. I admired the writing in ‘The Imitation Game’ and hope Graham Moore gets the Oscar, though I wish someone had stopped him, or the director, from repeating the ‘deep’ line three times (something like ‘It’s the people you can’t imagine doing anything who do the things you can’t imagine’). So many still to see, but thus far the only perfect film of the year is ‘Paddington’. Don’t be fooled by the child-oriented subject matter: this is an easy one to get wrong, and they got every part of it right. An instant classic.