This season’s awards movies demonstrate that cinema is dodging today’s pressing issues in favour of anodyne distraction
This season’s lineup of awards contenders has much to offer: it may be the best crop of hopefuls for a decade. Fine direction, acting, sound, design and technical innovation deliver a feast for the eye, ear, heart and soul. But for the brain? Not so much.
Leading the race, according to the bookies, for the biggest prize of both Baftas and
Oscars is 1917. It is a great film, but it reflects a current big-screen aversion to engaging with the issues that determine our fate. It restricts itself so entirely to the felt experience of its principals that we are left knowing nothing, not just of the vast conflict of which their story forms part, but even of what brought them into it.