Plans to slash the time between cinema and DVD release, alongside improvements in home viewing technology, could kill multiplexes. Would you care?

It does not seem quite the right moment to be worrying about the future of our multiplexes. This weekend, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland will become the second movie of 2010 to break the $1bn barrier at the box office, following James Cameron’s Avatar earlier in the year. Prior to its arrival on cinema screens, some speculated that audiences might find a reimagining of Lewis Carroll’s famous tale from the peculiar mind of Tim Burton a little too weird for comfort. Yet it is about to join an exclusive club of six movies, including Titanic, The Dark Knight, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. The huge success of these films suggests that people are seeing movies in ever greater numbers.

The remarkable figures for Burton’s film, and the fact that it is still playing in multiplexes, make a mockery of the battle earlier this year between cinema chains and Disney. The mouse house had wanted to bring forward Alice in Wonderland’s home video release to well within the traditional 17-week window that usually follows a film’s theatrical bow. Several UK chains, including Odeon, Vue and Cineworld, threatened to boycott the film in retaliation, but a compromise was agreed that supposedly preserved the window on an ongoing basis while allowing Disney to push Alice on to DVD according to its preferred timetable.

The cinema chains were, of course, terrified that they would lose revenue if studios began routinely releasing films on DVD within just two or three months of their big-screen debuts. And they have good reason: ever since the early 1980s, when VHS players began to arrive in homes, the release “window” has been getting smaller and smaller, and the Alice in Wonderland battle is likely to be the first of many. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that a number of studios were considering plans to offer US cable customers the chance to view movies just 30 days after they hit multiplexes. They would have to pay $30 (around £20) a pop for the privilege, but the move would crucially undermine the release window and – critics suggest – could even lead to the destruction of the cinema industry as it stands.

It’s easy to forget that, in many ways, going to the movies is not a natural communal experience. Most go to see new films at cinemas because they have to, and because they are used to doing so. While people will always visit bars and clubs – if only to meet members of the opposite sex – it’s unlikely we would leave the house given the option to download good quality copies of a film at a fair price for viewing at home.

In the 1950s, before the advent of TV, cinemas used to show serials as well as feature-length movies, but these became obsolete when people realised they could watch similar fare more conveniently in their living rooms. In fact, it’s possible to argue that the release window is the only thing keeping the cinema industry alive. Even 3D, the great revolution that was designed to revive box office fortunes – and has succeeded in doing so – will soon be available at home. The first 3D TVs have just gone on sale in this country, and broadcasters such as Sky have firm plans for new channels to take advantage of the technology.

All of this, of course, ignores the unfettered joy of seeing a film on the big screen. It is the reason why laughter tracks were first inserted into comedy shows on TV – people missed the feeling of being in the company of others. But would the death of cinemas really be such a loss? Hollywood fare is often predicated on the tastes of teenagers, who make up the largest portion of the cinema-going population. It is designed for the big screen, and big soundsystems, which means it is often built around spectacular action scenes and special effects. The difference between seeing a Roland Emmerich movie in the cinema and at home, is palpable.

In fact, in a world without big screens, Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and those other famous five movies that have broken the $1bn barrier might never have existed. Will we see a return to more cerebral fare, aimed at the older people who enjoy watching a film at home? Would the whole concept of a blockbuster movie go out the window? Or would things remain pretty much the same? One thing’s for sure – curious and curiouser doesn’t even begin to cut it.

Read the full review here

The cherry blossom is at its best, and James Cameron’s iPod-fired installation of the Tree of Souls is rooting resplendent in Hyde Park. In celebration, nilpferd fells the best film clips featuring our fronded friends

“Of all the wonders of nature, a tree in summer is perhaps the most remarkable,” said Woody Allen, “with the possible exception of a moose singing ‘Embraceable You’ in spats”.

There’s certainly something fickle about film’s relationship with our arboreal friends. The twisted roots of a dense forest conjure up debauched rituals – most recently in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist – yet filmmakers will also use the gentle rustling of leaves within the crown of a mature oak to portray spiritual reflection. Trees can be passive victims of human folly, or – as in Avatar – mystically resilient organisms intimately tied into the natural world. Are you more likely to quiver at the sight of a silver birch, or does your heart yearn for the limbs of a lime?

In acknowledgement of our ever-increasing dependence on these docile CO2 consumers, let’s consider cinema’s treatment of the tree. Climb carefully up the YouTube trunk and see what you can shake down from above. And if you must use a saw, don’t forget to stand trunkside.

1) The roots of a tree planted in the backyard are a metaphor for sibling rivalry in Jane Campion’s Sweetie.

2) 50s eco warriors Chip and Dale try to prevent lumberjack Donald Duck from removing their house in Up a Tree.

3) Herzog employs a cast of thousands – then cuts most of them down to move a boat over a hill – in Fitzcarraldo.

4) The crippled Horibe finds a moment of peace among cherry trees in Hana Bi, though his painting (eight minutes in) depicts them as threateningly omnipresent.

5) Redwoods are the essential feature of Return of the Jedi’s forest moon of Endor, most notably during the speeder bike chase.

On last week’s Clip joint, steenbeck took you under her wing and introduced you to the best film moments featuring unlikely guardians. Here’s her top picks from your suggested clips.

1) I love the lack of sentimentality in Gloria. They’re both hardened individuals, but you sense the potential for burgeoning respect and affection. And I’m a sucker for these raw production values.

2) This scene from Mon Oncle captures the hand-in-hand moment. As fleeting, sweet and unexpected as sighting a rare bird.

3) In Zazie Dans Le Metro, comedy and pathos meet. A child’s harrowing tale is set on edge by the most wonderfully filmed display of slapstick humour.

4) Paper Moon is beautifully stark and emotionally harsh. With almost no words, the child expresses her eagerness to please and her resentment at being used; her quiet, honest expression is a sharp contrast to his breezy, uncomfortable volubility.

And this week’s winner is greatpoochini with Tiger Bay. The scene is visually striking with its glowing whites and coal-black darkness, but the real impact comes from the characters’s unabashed exhibition of neediness and attachment, despite the fact that they come from completely different worlds, and they can only bring each other grief.

Thanks also to windupbirdchronicles, Nilpferd, Menemonic and ChewZ for the rest of the week’s featured clips.

Fancy writing Clip Joint? Email Catherine Shoard for more details. Please put “Clip Joint” in the subject line.

Read the full review here

Is there anything as undignified as watching a 1975 film superimposed with 2010 effects in the shameless pursuit of cash?

Avatar’s got a lot to answer for, hasn’t it? Its barnstorming success hasn’t just ensured that we won’t be able to go to the cinema for the next couple of years without putting on a pair of bulky, uncomfortable 3D glasses first; it also means that a number of film-makers are thinking about dragging their most fondly-remembered works out for a 3D makeover.

James Cameron’s plans to re-release Titanic in 3D are understandable – he is, after all, the champion of this new technology. And George Lucas’s plans to re-release all the Star Wars films in 3D are understandable because, well, he’s George Lucas and who knows what the hell goes on in his brain any more. But when a feature in the LA Times recently mentioned that producer Richard D Zanuck was toying with the possibility of putting Jaws through a 3D conversion process, the internet exploded. It was the three-dimensional straw that broke the online camel’s back, so to speak.

The outcry was immediate, fierce (Dread Central called it “mind-numbingly bad“, JoBlo said it would be a “disaster“) and, for the most part, completely justified. In fact, the distraught fan reaction to Jaws 3D – even the mooted possibility that there might be a Jaws 3D at some unspecified point in the distant future – should act as an example for anyone else who’s currently looking to cash in on the fad.

First there’s the fact that post-production 3D conversions look terrible, as anyone who witnessed Liam Neeson’s head appearing to float three feet behind his body during Clash Of The Titans will tell you. Then there’s the fact that there has already been a 3D Jaws movie (or two, if you want to count Back To The Future II’s Jaws 19 3D) and it was lousy. So lousy that the fuzzy image of a shark’s grenade-obliterated jawbone bobbing through an ocean of what appears to be KY Jelly from 1983’s Jaws 3D is still the go-to reference for anyone pointing out the drawbacks of the technology.

Most importantly though, film-makers need to remember the importance of the definitive version. Jaws was released in 1975. Everyone knows it was released in 1975. Countless memories have been formed of the definitive 1975 version of Jaws. Yes, it’s dated, but that’s because it was made in 1975. People understand that.

Imagine if Richard D Zanuck had caved into every passing cinematic trend that had popped up since 1975. Then we wouldn’t just have one version of Jaws: we’d have the original Jaws, the Jaws inspired by the Star Wars re-releases starring a badly-rendered computer-animated shark, the Jaws inspired by the Tom & Jerry re-releases with all the cigarettes digitally erased and replaced with pens and carrots and knitting needles, the Jaws inspired by Apocalypse Now Redux where it’s 12 hours long and contains hundreds of new scenes that don’t move the story forward or have any worth whatsoever, and countless other versions too horrifying to mention.

If you’re a film-maker, the most important lesson you can learn is to never go back. Tinkering with your past doesn’t bring it up to date. Watching a 1975 film superimposed with 2010 effects will be like watching your dad pick you up from school dressed like Dappy from N-Dubz and calling everyone “blood”. It’s undignified. It will fool nobody. And, worst of all, it’ll make you look like George Lucas. That hasn’t been a good thing for quite some time now.

Read the full review here

The idea of making history with Kathryn Bigelow won the Academy over in the end – that along with the authenticity of The Hurt Locker and a clever awards campaign

Avatar and The Hurt Locker entered Sunday’s Oscar ceremony like a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier and a dinghy bound for the same chunk of promised land. The seemingly mismatched opponents were the lead contenders for the major prizes outside the acting categories (Hurt Locker’s Jeremy Renner was a deserving nominee but it was always going to be Jeff Bridges’s night) and, of course, there was the added spice factor of marital history.

James Cameron glided into the 82nd annual Academy Awards at the helm of Avatar, Golden Globulised six weeks earlier in the best director and picture categories and, lest we forget, the biggest movie of all time. Here was a man whose films are so vast they dispense with definite articles and need only trade on one-word titles; the cinematic equivalent of Oprah, Madonna or Beckham. Here was a movie whose $2.5bn(£167bn)-and-counting box office is two-thirds the size of what Fiji’s purchasing power was in 2009. Many believed the major Oscars were Cameron’s to lose. But they hadn’t reckoned on his former missus.

Kathryn Bigelow, a gifted storyteller and action director who had previously served up guilty pleasures such as Point Break, Blue Steel and the truly sensational, much misunderstood Strange Days, proved to be a force. Her latest, The Hurt Locker, refused to capsize in Avatar’s monstrous wake and gamely stayed the course throughout the awards season. Despite only grossing $14.7m at the north American box office (the lowest grossing best picture winner ever – Summit Entertainment is considering a re-release), the thriller had become a critical darling, hailed as the best Iraq war film to come out of the US, and indeed the best visceral slice of war on screen in many a year.

Critics are so far removed from commercial sensibilities they might as well be living on Avatar’s planet Pandora. This worked to the advantage of The Hurt Locker. Their steadfast belief in the anti-blockbuster allowed it to gain momentum so that, despite the Golden Globes shut-out, it had already reached the status of serious Oscar hopeful. As the season wore on, and more and more critics’ groups across the US – Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Austin, Boston, to name a few – rewarded Bigelow and The Hurt Locker, its star continued to rise.

As the awards season entered February, voters agreed privately they had had enough of the blue-skinned giants. My own decidedly unscientific poll of a small number of Academy members who spoke on condition of anonymity was revealing. Avatar had reaped sufficient rewards, they said, and it was time to honour a movie that made them think, moved them, and embodied a sense of timeliness and timelessness.

Academy voters are a sentimental lot and the idea of making history is alluring. Enter awards specialist Cynthia Swartz of PR agency 42West. Hired by Summit Entertainment, Swartz devised a campaign that rightly cast Bigelow as a brilliant director who could hold her own in a man’s world while raising the prospect of the first female director to win an Oscar. The idea was intoxicating and I can attest to the speed with which it coursed through Hollywood’s bloodstream. Within a day of the nominations on 2 February, there was barely talk of anything else.

For the record, Swartz also got people talking about the man who started it all. Screenwriter Mark Boal was inspired by his time as a journalist embedded with US troops to write about his experiences. He would also win an Oscar on Sunday and introduced a valuable element of authenticity to the story, one that was potent enough to ensure that the usual 11th-hour sprinkling of ill-founded lawsuits and threats of plagiarism that besmirch almost every Oscar race largely fell on deaf ears. Besides, the members had already voted by the time most of the crackpots came out of the woodwork.

Swartz ensured that Academy voters received swanky DVD screeners. The critics awards kept on coming. Then on 31 January Bigelow became the first woman to clinch the Directors Guild Of America (DGA) award. By now the sense of history in the making was irresistible. The winner of the DGA has gone on to win the best directing Oscar on all but six occasions since the Guild launched its annual prize in 1948. The Bafta ceremony was a confidence booster, a dress rehearsal for what was to come, and by the time Barbra Streisand took to the stage at the Kodak theatre on Sunday to present the Academy award for best director, Cameron must have been shrinking in his seat. To be fair, the two remain on good terms, and he looked genuinely pleased for Bigelow when his ex-wife’s name was read out. Cameron is probably pleased for everybody these days – so would you be if you’d just made the biggest movie of all time and earned a personal fortune in the region of $225m.

The Academy loves an epic, and on Sunday that epic was the story of David v Goliath. The best picture Oscar, The Hurt Locker’s sixth on the night following other senior honours such as Boal’s screenplay award and the editing prize, was a fitting finale for a plucky movie that deserved to be seen by a wider public audience. Thanks to a smart awards campaign it was seen by a wide audience of critics and awards voters, and in the end, that was all that counted.

Read the full review here

Miley Cyrus was weedy, the Brat Pack survivors were scary, and the director of Crazy Heart built his part up. Here are the Oscars the Academy should have dished out

Biggest cop-out

While Neil Patrick Harris was ace, it felt completly disconnected from everything else in the Academy plan: It was like “Hugh Jackman was good last year” + “NPH was good at the Emmys last year” + “audiences like things that are old and safe and unthreatening like Steve Martin. Let’s mix all of those without actually letting them intersect in any interesting fashion, yeah?”

Weakest hosting hit

Some hosts manage to make that bit where they run through every important nominee and namecheck them, by rote, without leaving anyone out and with equal weight given to their mention, with complete dignity. Addressing James Cameron with the 3D glasses was less than sledgehammer-obvious; he stared at them like the tall guy hearing the “what’s the weather up there like” joke.

Weakest host

Miley Cyrus – who, of all the very slight presenters was very much the slightest: wins the not-eating-solid-food award for this day and perhaps the last week. That they do it isn’t the bad example to teenage girls. That Miley looks like it at all, is.

Best hosting moment

Tina Fey and Robert Downey Jr had the temerity to be quite funny about the relationship between actor and writer; the actor being beautiful, magnetic, memorable. The writer, in the words that Downey Jnr carefully and sometimes mispronouncinglyly read off the teleprompter: “sickly little mole people”.

Greatest invasion of the stage by the undead

After the John Hughes montage. The stage suddenly filled with deeply-eyebagged, hollow-eye-holed 80s actors, staring into the camera, telling a faceless world about the moments (long ago) when they were famous. It was deeply, deeply chilling.

Kanye-ism of the night

Elinor Burkett and Roger Ross Williams. Who knows (or cares, really?) what the deep and complicated backstory of why the producers of best documentary short - Music by Prudence – raced each other up to the stage then had an undignified shoulder-battle for the microphone. It’s just good for the Academy that they did. Because seriously, by that point? We were rubbing the Oscar-come-alivey paddles together. Yes, that’s a technical name.

Best argument for the existence of Sacha Baron Cohen

Questions abound about what would have been worse – Baron Cohen saying something mildly offensive about Cameron, or Ben Stiller saying absolutely nothing funny whatsoever. With all votes (except the show’s producers’) plumping for the latter.

Most multi-layered acceptance speech

Luckily, when everyone in the world is expecting you to win the award for best supporting actress, you can get away with giving a speech that is so well planned and tightly nested it will take weeks to unpack, politically, creatively and grammatically. Including the part where Mo’Nique called out Tyler Perry and Oprah, saying “Because you touched it, the whole world saw it” – which frankly just sounds filthy.

Best juxtaposition

The making of whores jokes didn’t seem off colour, but suddenly when they made horse jokes, the fact that Sarah Jessica Parker was the next celebrity seemed a little close to the bone.

Unclassy moment of the night

Sam Worthington arrived on stage as a presenter this year: sadly, under my newly instituted “people who chew gum onstage are excluded from the Oscar ceremonies FOR EVER MORE” rules.

Biggest non-award split of the night

This seemed to be the division between people who thought that interpretive dance by hip-hop/modern dance crews was a right thing to do and … other people. One does wish they had had a longer time to listen to the world’s best party music before this moment. That’s all.

Most dedicated to making the most of his moment

The director of Crazy Heart, thanked by Jeff Bridges, stood up, waved his arms and just kept waving them, like a man lost in the ocean of “knowing he’s not going to be winning the best director award anytime soon”, waving down that “milk-it” boat until everyone forgot what they were doing …

Most distracting audience member

If you have the chance to watch it again, look out for the man sitting behind Helen Mirren, who looks like either a) a robot, b) Mickey Rourke’s plastic surgeon (who, it turns out, also did his own face) or c) Robert Downey Jr in 30 years’ time.

Greatest missed opportunity

Watching Kathryn Bigelow collect not only the best director but also best picture Oscar, shaking ever more by the second, was a powerful experience. If she’d actually shouted “Who’s king of the world NOW, bitch!?” it would have been completely brilliant.

Read the full review here

Brazilian bad karma derailed James Cameron, Londoners weren’t thinking big, and Roger Ebert gave a Twitter masterclass - social media held the key to navigating this year’s Oscars

Film buffs from across the world gathered around their television sets last night to drink/practise yoga (depending on the time zone) and watch this year’s Oscars ceremony. Along the way they blogged, tweeted and – even – reported on the event, and in the process revealed that Brazil doesn’t like James Cameron much.

That the South Americans are antipathetic to the Avatar man is certainly the impression you’d get from looking at the trending topics on Twitter this morning. The social networking site was churning through thousands of posts a minute during the height of the Oscars ceremony, and many of those that originated from Brazil were followed by the tag #chupajamescameron. A piece of local slang, chupa means “suck it!”, suggesting either that either Brazilians were glad the Avatar director lost to his ex-wife’s The Hurt Locker, or he’s being offered a giant caipirinha complete with straw.

In other locations, topics trended differently. Londoners, being a bunch of poncey so-and-sos, were talking about Logorama, the winner in the animated short category. Also trending there were Christoph Waltz, the Austrian who won best supporting actor for his role in Inglourious Basterds, and Molly Ringwald, who delivered a tribute to the departed John Hughes and looked a lot older than people remembered her being in 1985.

Meanwhile in the States, the coasts were posting about Kathryn Bigelow (the Hurt Locker director’s name trending well in LA and New York), whereas the chart for the US as a whole had another woman entirely, Catherine Bigalow, as the name of the moment.

When everyone and their dog is tweeting about the Oscars, there are some voices that are worth listening to a little more attentively than others. Roger Ebert (@ebertchicago) is a case in point: the Chicago Sun-Times film critic is a dab hand at the 140-character format and was tweeting with aplomb throughout the night.

Examples included:

“WTF? Cinematography for “Avatar” and all that CGI and green screen? Not for Basterds or White Ribbon?”

And, when Quentin Tarantino and Pedro Almodóvar appeared to introduce the best foreign film category:

“Almodóvar intros a category in which his Broken Embraces absolutely should have been nominated.”

And, finally, after Jeff Bridges collected his best actor gong:

“The Dude Aboded.”

Away from social networking, and most of the big online film sites were running live blogs of the event. Some offered nothing much more than endless sniping about dresses; others, like the one at Entertainment Weekly, were hosted by staffers as keen to share details of their private lives than talk about the nominations (Missy: “From the French husband: ‘This is a cool format.’” Missy: “Il s’appelle Julien”; Missy: “We watched The Big Lebowski together on the night we were married”).

Nikki Finke delivered a “Live Snark” on her Deadline Hollywood Daily pages that definitely lived up to the title. This, for example, was her take on The Hurt Locker best picture win: “So David slew Goliath. Or, to put it another way, Academy voters rewarded a tiny film that made no money just because almost everyone in Hollywood really dislikes James Cameron. This shows how out of touch the Oscars are with moviegoers around the world, who loved Avatar. And people wonder why I have nothing but contempt for the Academy?”

Finke’s was an opinion almost entirely contrary to that of AO Scott, who was liveblogging at the New York Times. “No great surprises in the end,” Scott wrote, “but a reminder that 2009 was a pretty good year for movies … sometimes even in Hollywood money and hype and spin are not entirely decisive. The Hurt Locker is an honest, tough, well-made movie. The Academy got it right: not something I’m used to saying.”

Finally, if you were after something other than the printed word, there were other ways of consuming Oscar commentary. The Movie blog, for example, chose to do its Oscars coverage via Ustream; a live unedited video feed. This was all marvellous and modern, in principle, at least. In practice, it was more than four hours of watching a man peer at his laptop reading other people’s comments.

Read the full review here

The Hurt Locker was the big winner at this year’s Oscars, emerging with six, including Kathryn Bigelow’s history-making award for best director as well as best picture. Here’s how Xan Brooks liveblogged the night

11.45pm: The 82nd annual Academy Awards begin with a carpet. This carpet is richly red and freshly laundered. It is guarded by security goons and bathed in spotlights.

Up the carpet come the early arrivals: the nominated and the not nominated and the milling dignitaries who don’t seem quite sure where they are going. The street is behind them and the Kodak theatre is up ahead.

Few of these arrivals are as early as Mariah Carey, who breezily explains that she is on “Mariah Time”. This presumably means that she can come and go when she wants, and may well decide to take a nap in the middle of the ceremony if the mood takes her.

As for us, we are (as the time-stamp suggests) working on Greenwich Mean Time. This is on account of us sitting in a deserted office in nocturnal London as opposed to, say, living it up in sun-drenched LA. One day, God willing, we shall all be living on Mariah Time too. But sadly not this year.

0.05am: It transpires that the route up the carpet is fraught with danger. In order to access their seats inside the Kodak theatre, the millionaire guests must first run the gauntlet of the neon-bright presenters from Sky and E!. These presenters lie in wait and then ambush them, knee-capping the talent with brazen flattery and well-oiled platitudes. It’s like a celebrity version of British Bulldog.

Out in the sunshine, the likes of James Cameron, Quentin Tarantino and Carey Mulligan are subjected to a potent charm offensive. When the Roman emperors made their triumphant entrance, they were escorted by a slave whose job it was to whisper “Remember, you are mortal” into their ears. This, supposedly, ensured that they kept their feet on the ground.

The guests at the 82nd Academy Awards, by contrast, are greeted by presenters such as Angela Griffin, who tells Mulligan that she is “very lovely”, Nick Park that he is “amazing” and Cameron that his wife is “a goddess”. In this way they are wafted into the Kodak theatre with their egos swollen to the size of Texas, perfectly primed for prime-time humiliation.

“It’s your night tonight,” Griffin confesses to Sandra Bullock, who is up for the best actress award. “It’s everybody’s night,” shoots back canny Bullock.

“Ha ha ha!” says Griffin. “Ha ha ha!”

0.20am: You want celebrities on this red carpet? By God, you shall have it. Here we have Penélope Cruz and Sarah Jessica Parker, Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith. Griffin duly buttonholes Parker (who kindly explains that she is wearing a dress by Chanel), while Christopher Plummer (Oscar-nominated for The Last Station) stands obediently to one side. One day, perhaps, some smart producer will cast these two in some kind of rom-com. They look so good together.

A moment later, Griffin moves on to talk to Precious director Lee Daniels, who has shown up with his daughter. I was half hoping that Griffin would tell Daniels to remember that he is mortal. Instead, she tells him that he is the best father in the world. Daniels beams happily at that.

“Ha ha ha!” says Griffin, who then goes on to explain that she “keeps screaming”. Surely this is cause for concern. My fear is that she may well be suffering a nervous breakdown, right there beneath the floodlights.

0.40am: Alarming news. Fresh from confiding that she “keeps on screaming”, the excitable Ms Griffin has just announced that she “can’t hear myself think, what with all the screaming going on”. What does she mean by this? That the demons in her own head have now grown so loud and insistent that they are drowning out everything else? Or that her own nervous collapse is somehow contagious and has infected all those around her? The second option, I think, is probably the more terrifying. It suggests that this whole impeccably mounted event may be on the brink of pitching into outright chaos.

Soldiering gamely on, Griffin accosts George Clooney who is thankfully not screaming yet. Clooney is nominated for best actor for Up in the Air, but promptly confesses that “Jeff Bridges is going to win”.

Seconds later and here’s the man himself. Bridges has been nominated three times before but is this year’s heavy favourite to take the award for his turn as a broken-down country singer in Crazy Heart. “I’m not counting any chickens,” he says, like the polished old pro that he is.

0.55am: The ceremony has yet to begin and we already have a bona fide British success story. This story goes by the name of Hamish Hamilton, who looks like Chris Evans’s wholesome younger brother and is apparently “the director of this year’s Oscars”. He explains what an honour it is to be here. “Ha ha ha,” says Griffin.

Thanks for your comments so far, even the ones that seem to be accusing me of living on Mariah Time and not posting regularly enough. Mercurey suggests that George Clooney is wearing a wig. In the immortal, eloquent words of Angela Griffin: “Ha ha ha!”

Right, it seems that the carpet is emptying out, which means that the Kodak theatre must be filling up. Are we to take this to mean that the 82nd Academy Awards are about to start?

1.05am: More alarming news: it seems I spoke too soon. The 82nd Academy Awards are not beginning just yet, perhaps because the guests are still assembling behind closed doors, fighting over their seats and firing air kisses across the aisle.

Just time for a swift preamble. This year’s best picture shortlist runs to 10 films for the first time since 1943 (when Casablanca took the prize). Even so, the event comes billed as a straight contest between David and Goliath, aka Avatar and The Hurt Locker, which lead the field with nine nominations apiece. Lagging just a nose behind is Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds with eight nominations. Tarantino’s reinvented second world war history lesson would dearly love to play the role of spoiler and looks set for at least one major award, with German actor Christoph Waltz the firm favourite to win best supporting actor.

Our hosts for the event are Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, who were last seen together in It’s Complicated, a teeth-grinding, reputed comedy by Nancy Meyers. The only way is up for Steve and Alec.

1.20am: “It’s time for a break,” says Claudia Winkleman, reclining on a Barbarella space-pod chair inside the Sky television studio. A break from what, exactly? A break from the break, I suppose. Time to make like Mariah and grab a quick 40 winks.

Interesting thoughts, in the meantime, from DanAshcroft on why The Hurt Locker will win and Avatar won’t. Elsewhere AnthonyFarrantHeel speculates that Morgan Freeman is drunk. I truly hope this is so, if only to liven up the ceremony. What kind of drunk do you think Freeman would be? A violent marauder, or the maudlin, tactile type who keeps asking everyone to go on holiday with him?

For the record, Angela Griffin is back to tell us her “absolute highlight” of the night so far. Her highlight, it transpires, was Sarah Jessica Parker, because she is “so in love with her”.

Griffin refrains from telling us what her lowlight was, though I think we all know what it was. The screaming, of course. The screaming. There was a moment back there when she very nearly lost it.

1.35am: At long last, “it’s the Oscars”. And it begins, bizarrely enough, with a musical preamble, in which the nominees for best actor and best actress stand motionless on the stage, grinning sheepishly into the cameras like contestants on some debased Blind Date spin-off.

After what feels like an eternity, various men and women run up on stage to claim them. At first I think that these are the “dates” and that they will all be back next week to tell us how it’s gone. “Meryl was a lovely girl but, I don’t know, there wasn’t really any spark. I’d like to see her again, but only as a friend.” But no – it turns out that these are just “helpers”, on hand to escort the stars back to their allocated seats.

As soon as that’s over, Neil Patrick Harris (aka Doogie Howser) steps up to sing a song. All at once, the Blind Date spin-off doesn’t look so bad after all.

1.45am: It’s official. Oscar hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin are a hell of a lot funnier here than they were in It’s Complicated. Their routine pokes amiable, irreverent fun at the nominated films and star contenders. They drip faint praise on the likes of The Last Station and Invictus. Baldwin points out that Martin is a huge fan of Invictus because “it combines his two biggest passions – rugby and tensions between blacks and whites”.

Then they move on to the nominees.

Martin: “There’s that damn Helen Mirren.”
Baldwin: “Steve, that’s Dame Helen Mirren.”

From here, they turn to Meryl Streep. When people talk of Meryl Streep, says Martin, they all say the exact same thing: “Can that woman act? And what’s the deal with all that Hitler memorabilia?”

1.50am: So here we have it, the first award of the night. It’s the best supporting actor award – unofficially known this year as the No Shit, Sherlock award.

It goes, as pretty much everyone said it would, to Christoph Waltz for his flamboyant, lip-smacking turn as the “Jew hunter” Nazi colonel in Inglourious Basterds.

A fortnight ago at the Baftas, Waltz gave a lengthy and eloquent speech about how he was a “supported actor” as opposed to a supporting one. Here, he appears pinched by the 45-second curfew and rattles through a hasty thanks. Then off he goes, clutching the final award of his glittering awards season; his crowning moment over almost before it begun.

2.05am: Time now for the Oscar for best animated feature, another of those awards that seemed to have been decided sometime last November. Suffice to say it does not go to The Secret of Kells.

Instead it goes to Up, Pixar’s buoyant, beautifully made yarn about a curmudgeonly old widower who floats off in search of adventure. Director Pete Docter steps up to collect this one and duly pays tribute to his wife and kids who are, he says, “his best adventure”. Is this a diplomatic way of saying that the kids are a bit of a handful? Ah well, that’s Hollywood offspring for you.

2.10am: The red carpet is a distant memory, shrieking Angela Griffin has been left with her demons and the Oscars are coming thick and fast right now. The gong for best original song goes to The Weary Kind from Crazy Heart.

It is collected by writers T-Bone Burnett and Ryan Bingham, who gives thanks to his wife and says: “I love you more than rainbows, baby.” This strikes me as a little harsh on the rainbows and makes me wonder just how many rainbows he has actually witnessed, because some of them are truly, deeply wonderful and all that. But we’ll let it go for now.

Incidentally, isn’t “Ryan Bingham” the name of the character that George Clooney plays in Up in the Air? All of a sudden these Oscars are starting to blur; the line between fiction and reality warping and breaking down. Next I’ll be wondering if T-Bone Burnett was actually the name of the seductive, lingerie-wearing muse that Penélope Cruz played in Nine. The best bit of that entire film was the scene in which T-Bone Burnett writhed on that four-poster bed and stuck his bum in the air.

2.20am: Tina Fey and Robert Downey Jr swing their way through a sharp, funny routine before handing the best original screenplay Oscar to Mark Boal for The Hurt Locker. It’s the first award of the night for Kathryn Bigelow’s superbly tense and bruising Iraq war drama. But we’re betting it won’t be the last.

At the podium, Boal dedicates the prize to the troops still stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan and to his father, who passed away a month ago. His voice quavers a bit at this point, but the 45-second rule comes to his aid and he is whisked safely off the stage. Who knows: this may well be the first entirely tear-free Academy Awards – and all on account of that pesky time constraint.

2.35am: “Right now, we would like to introduce two beautiful actresses,” says Steve Martin. “Because frankly, we are sick of bringing out all these ugly actresses.”

These particular actresses, for the record, are Carey Mulligan out of An Education and Zoe Saldana, who looks much shorter than she did in Avatar, and is also less blue, and doesn’t appear to have a tail either, although it’s obviously hard to tell under that dress she is wearing. They are here to announce the winner of the award for best animated short. The winner is Logorama, by the Frenchman Nicholas Schmerkin. He explains that a lot of work went into making Logorama and adds that he hopes to return with a full-length animated feature in about 36 years.

2.40am: The Oscars are coming at a mile a minute. Music for Prudence scoops best documentary short and its makers joust briefly at the microphone before the music swells up and drowns them out.

Seconds later, The New Tenants takes the Oscar for best “live action” short. Again, two makers step up to accept the prize but this time there is no jousting. One man hogs the mic and makes his speech. Finally, the other chap gets his chance and hoves up to the podium just as the music starts playing. His mouth is moving but his sound has been cut. He had a message for the world, but the world will now never know what it was. Was it something important? He looked as though it might have been important.

Hey ho, too late now. He’s bundled off the stage and we’re on to the award for best makeup. Ben Stiller is here and he is dressed as a Na’vi! The makeup Oscar goes to Barney Burman, Mindy Hall and Joel Harlow for Star Trek! They have something to say! It is not particularly important!

2.55am: “Who’s that?” demands my esteemed colleague Jason Solomons of the lissome presenter of this year’s best adapted screenplay award. We think that it is Rachel McAdams, and she is indeed looking glorious. Coincidentally, this is the exact same question that Rachel McAdams asks whenever she sees Jason reviewing the movies on telly. “Who’s that?” she demands, sitting bolt upright in her jacuzzi. “Who’s that?” Exact same question.

The Oscar goes to Geoffrey Fletcher for Precious. This is a surprise for most of the onlookers. It also seems to be a surprise for Fletcher himself, who chokes up charmingly up the podium. “I’m drying up right now,” he croaks. He can barely get the words out and the 45-second limit yawns like an eternity before him.

“I wrote that script for him,” boasts Steve Martin afterwards.

3.05am: Time now for the best supporting actress Oscar. It goes (as it did at the Globes and then again at the Baftas) to Mo’Nique for her tour-de-force in Precious.

Glad to see that Mo’Nique has decided to show up tonight. At the Baftas she sent director Lee Daniels to collect the award on her behalf. This, surely, is just one step up from requesting that they simply Fed-Ex the thing to her agent.

On stage, Mo’Nique gives thanks to Hattie McDaniel, the first African-American performer to ever win an Academy Award (for Gone With the Wind, back in 1939). Didn’t George Clooney also reference McDaniel at this event a few years back? Maybe there should be a posthumous award for the most cited former Oscar winner. McDaniel, on recent evidence, would walk it.

3.10am: Two whole hours into the Oscar telecast and here it is: the first award for Avatar. It’s for art direction and is read out by Sigourney Weaver, which might lead some to smell a rat. Wasn’t Weaver, like, in Avatar? Now here she is assuring us that, yes, it did really win this Oscar. That’s like asking David Cameron to call the upcoming election, live on the BBC.

My advice to the rival nominees: make sure you check the envelope. We could have the first big scandal of this year’s event, playing out right under Weaver’s nose.

Moving swiftly on, British designer Sandy Powell picks up the costume award for her work on The Young Victoria. Some winners are overcome by emotion and others, it seems, could barely give a stuff.

“I’ve already got two of these,” says Powell with a shrug. She’s like an unimpressed kid who’s just unwrapped her third flower-press on Christmas morning. Yes, she’s prepared to thank Auntie Margaret, but her heart’s not really in it.

3.25am: Now up come Twilight stars Taylor Lautner and and Kristen Stewart to introduce a montage of American horror movies (of which Twilight is apparently one). Surely this is the first time that Night of the Living Dead and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre have appeared on an Oscar telecast – and it’s about time too.

Some colleagues in the office seem purely flummoxed by it. “Why is this going on?” asks Paul MacInnes, who is sitting opposite. I’m guessing he means the horror montage as opposed to, you know, the whole shebang. The endless parade of Oscars. The endless telecast. The endless entrances and exits.

Why is it going on? What is the point to any of it?

Oh, hang on: just remembered. Woo-hoo! It’s all about the epic battle between Avatar and The Hurt Locker. And right here, right now, The Hurt Locker appears to be edging ahead. Bigelow’s film has just picked up its second award of the night – for sound editing.

And then, seconds later, it’s three gongs for The Hurt Locker as it wins in the sister category of sound mixing. And look, here’s Ray Beckett back again to collect this one too. “This is a bit embarrassing,” he says. At this rate, he’ll be back up to claim this year’s best actress Oscar too.

3.40am: Hisses of dissatisfaction in the Guardian office as Mauro Fiore scoops the cinematography Oscar for his work on Avatar. The general hope was that Barry Ackroyd would get this for The Hurt Locker (and, by implication, all the other great films he’s shot). Sadly it was not to be.

Next up it’s Demi Moore. “Now it is the time when we celebrate life,” she says. I figured that’s what we’d been doing all night, but that just shows how much I know. Instead, it’s time for the annual Oscar obituary, which this year comes serenaded by James Taylor. The pictures flick past in a blur. Behind Taylor’s vocals, it is just possible to pick out the applause for certain favoured souls; for Budd Schulberg and Karl Malden, for Brittany Murphy and Natasha Richardson. Others, meanwhile, take their final bow to a stony silence.

So far as I can work out, the biggest burst of applause goes to Michael Jackson. Back in the studio, the Sky pundits appear quite enamoured of the obituary montage. “It’s a great career move,” says one. “You will shift units.”

3.50am: Dance routines. What would Oscar night be without a big, razzle-dazzle dance routine? Probably 10 minutes shorter and immeasurably more satisfying. But never mind, here comes this year’s edition. Let’s accentuate the positive. Some of the numbers are quite acrobatic. We see a girl in a spinning skirt and a man jumping about in a grandad cardigan. In the tribute to Pixar’s Up, the pace slows down and the performers stand about and twitch their heads, like androids trying to pass themselves off as village idiots. The dance wraps up with a standing ovation. At least I think it’s a standing ovation. It may well be another bit of the dance.

Then whoops, we’re back to the actual awards. Michael Giacchino wins best original score for Up. Fortunately he does not stand stock-still and make like a robot.

4am: Top of the hour and the main contestants are neck and neck. The Hurt Locker has three awards and now Avatar has three awards, having just taken the gong for best visual effects. So they swing into the final stretch, locked dead level. This, surely, is the sort of finish the Oscar organisers could only have dreamed of.

4.05am: Here comes Matt Damon (”Maaat Daay-man”) to present the award for best documentary feature. This looks a particularly strong category this year, but then maybe it is every year. We’ve got Burma VJ, The Cove, Food Inc, Which Way Home and The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers.

In the event, the Oscar goes to the gripping eco-documentary The Cove. You’d have to be employed by the Japanese fishing industry to have a problem with that.

4.10am: The deadlock is broken as The Hurt Locker takes the editing award and squeaks ahead, four Oscars to three. The acceptance speeches are over in the blink of an eye.

“Please welcome Keanu Reeves,” pleads a disembodied voice on the PA as the Matrix star trots forward to run us through another best picture montage. Why did they feel the need to do this? Did they worry that we wouldn’t (welcome him, that is)? Was there perhaps a time a few years back when Keanu bounded on stage, all excited and happy to be there, only to be left reeling from a tornado of catcalls, boos and hisses. So now the organisers are taking no chances. “Please welcome Keanu,” entreats the voice. “Have mercy. Give him a chance.” Happily they do. They indulgently welcome Keanu Reeves.

4.20am: What is it with the Academy voters and the best foreign language film Oscar? Every year they buck the trend and go for the warmest, lightest non-threatening film they can find. Last year’s contest was billed as a straight fight between The Class and Waltz with Bashir, only for the voters to give the prize to the wry Japanese comedy Departures.

This year’s battle was surely between Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon and Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet - both of which seem to have cleaned up everywhere else over the past 10 months or so. Sure enough, it goes to an Argentinean film called The Secret in Her Eyes. “I want to thank the Acadey for not considering Na’Vi a foreign language,” quips the director. OK, so I have yet to see The Secret in Her Eyes and maybe it’s brilliant. Until then, this result strikes me as more than a little perverse.

4.35am: A quintet of celebrity guests line up to heap praise on this year’s best actor nominees. Michelle Pfeiffer loves Jeff Bridges and Vera Farmiga lobbies for George Clooney. Julianne Moore just adores Colin Firth it is left to Tim Robbins to puncture the reverential mood, recalling his first meeting with Morgan Freeman, when the great man turned to him and spoke these words of wisdom: “The secret of being a good friend is fetching a good cup of coffee. Will you do that for me, Ted?”

Oh, and Colin Farrell really likes Jeremy Renner, who starred in The Hurt Locker.

Then up comes Kate Winslet to read out the winning name. And the winning name is …. Jeff Bridges for Crazy Heart.

It is fourth time lucky for the veteran actor, a man who has been so good for so long that we have sometimes risked taking him for granted. He bounds up like Baloo the Bear and then starts whooping at the rafters. Bridges offers genial thanks to his late parents, the the cast and crew on his film. He also thanks T-Bone Burnett, who is best remembered for his saucy supporting role in the musical Nine, where he wriggled about on a bed in his underwear.

And then, finally it’s a big Bridges thank-you to the wife and the kids. His speech wildly overruns the 45-second running time, but that’s OK. He’s taken his sweet time getting there and more than deserves his moment in the sun. If they’d given him an hour, it would have been fine by me.

4.50am: Another quintet of celebrities; another quintet of acting nominees. Forest Whitaker plays the role of hushed supplicant to Sandra Bullock. Michael Sheen lobs flirty, twinkling compliments at Helen Mirren. Peter Saarsgard seems to quite like Carey Mulligan (not too much; just enough) and Oprah Winfrey proceeds to sell Gabourey Sidibe (”a true American Cinderella!”) to the public like so much soap powder.

Last but not least, Stanley Tucci professes his undying love for Meryl Streep, but admits that he is pushing for the number of nominations for each actor to be henceforth capped at 16, just to keep her off the stage and give someone else a chance.

After that, a curiously diffident Sean Penn sidles out from the wings and peels open the envelope.

And the winner is … Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side.

“Did I really earn this, or did I just wear you all down?” asks Bullock. I’m guessing that this is a rhetorical question, but there’s no time to answer it anyway, because she’s off – thanking her fellow nominees, thanking the moms who never get any thanks but ought to because they’re great, and then breaking down as this leads her inevitably on to her own mom. It’s actually a pretty good speech: warm and fluid, and clearly from the heart. She even thanks those who have been “mean to her in the past” – including George Clooney who she claims to have once pushed her into a swimming pool.

4.55am: It’s time for the best director Oscar. Barbra Streisand is on stage and she opens the envelope. A secdond later, history is made. Kathryn Bigelow becomes the first woman to ever take the award for best direction. “It’s the moment of a lifetime,” she declares.

5am: Right, so Kathryn Bigelow has made history and busted the glass ceiling and all that. But there is no time to digest that, no time to mull over the implications of this mountainous achievement. Because all at once, it’s over.

Scuttling out from the wings comes Tom Hanks. He tears open an envelope, says something about Casablanca winning the best picture Oscar back in 1943 and then, without further ado, announces this year’s winner.

The crowning prize of this year’s Academy Awards goes to … The Hurt Locker.

5.10am: So that’s that. The 82nd annual Academy Awards crawled on its belly through however many hours and then abruptly broke into a sprint. It was past me before I knew it. The Hurt Locker finishes the night with six awards. Avatar limps in some way behind with a final tally of three.

The stage is crammed with producers of The Hurt Locker – all except the unfortunate Nicolas Chartier, who was barred from attending the event (something about a series of impolitic emails) and has presumably been watching events in some downtown sports bar. The winners give a shout-out to Chartier, though, so he is there in spirit.

And with that the 82nd Academy Awards come to an end. It’s left to Steve Martin to say the official farewells, looking back over a lengthy night that began with Angela Griffin screaming on the red carpet and ended up with Kathryn Bigelow clutching the statuette. “This show was so long that Avatar now takes place in the past,” says Martin.

And that sounds about right. This was the night in which a record-breaking $500m behemoth was comprehensively shot down by a low-budget war movie, and when a film that points the way to the future of cinema was (at least momentarily) consigned to history.

Thanks for sticking with me. Apologies as usual for the typos and the errors, the laughing and the screaming. And that’s us done and dusted. Is it Mariah Time already? If so, I’m straight off to bed. Roll carpet, roll credits. And please God, no booing. It has an annoying tendency to disturb the deepest slumber.

Read the full review here

Martin Scorsese’s thriller is at No 1 for the second week running, with A Prophet and Cop Out also performing well. And as Avatar keeps pulling them in, it looks like James Cameron’s personal paycheck could top $225m

The winner
Shutter Island will crack that old box office chestnut, the $100m (£66.5m) milestone, within a week or two following a tasty No 1 hold that saw Martin Scorsese’s haunting mystery add an estimated $22.2m in its second weekend. The film recently premiered at the Berlin international film festival and now stands at $75.1m. It shouldn’t have too much trouble easing past the century, which even in an age of blue-blooded commercial hits such as Avatar still means something to lower-budget releases.

The 1950s-set movie should also ease past Scorsese’s biggest box office hit to date, The Departed, which retired on $133.3m in early 2007. Speaking of Avatar, James Cameron’s die-hard, hard-to-die space opera has become the first movie to cross $700m as it grossed a further $14m in its 11th weekend on release for $706.9m. It held strong in fourth place, and that $14m haul was only 14% less than last weekend’s result.

Warner Bros’ syrupy Valentine’s Day oozed past $100m in its third weekend and has grossed nearly $200m globally. The mind boggles. Congratulations are due to Jacques Audiard’s French crime saga A Prophet, which not only smothered the French Cesar awards ceremony over the weekend with 10 wins – including best picture, director and star (Tahar Rahim) – but also pulled off a terrific launch through Sony Pictures Classics, pulling in $170,000 from nine cinemas. An excellent result and a nice little tee-up before the Oscars next weekend, when A Prophet goes head-to-head with The White Ribbon for the foreign language Academy award. There are three other nominees but with all respect to these noble entries, this is a two-horse race.

It would be remiss not to give a shout out to the Warner Bros’ action comedy Cop Out, with Bruce Willis, which opened second on $18.6m, and Overtures Films’ George A Romero remake The Crazies, which arrived in third on $16.5m. These rankings flatter to deceive at a time when older movies are slowing down and there was no really strong competition from the mid ranks. Disney’s Alice in Wonderland will shake things up next week.

The loser
You have got to think that, after three weekends in release, Universal will be disappointed with The Wolfman’s $57.2m running total. When a movie’s release gets put back for months on end it usually has something to do with the quality, and that seems to be the case here as no amount of barking and screaming from Benicio Del Toro and fretful glances from Emily Blunt can save it. Similarly, Fox’s Tooth Fairy has underperformed – or perhaps it has performed, but only to the best of its limited ability. After six weekends in the top 10, this latest family vehicle for The Rock has amassed $53.9m.

The real story
Where will Avatar end? This week the British trade publication Screen Daily estimates a final resting place in the region of $780m in North America and $2.8bn worldwide, adding that once Fox has paid its financing partners Dune and Ingenious, recouped its production and marketing spend, shared proceeds with exhibitors, paid various other fees and cut a cheque to Cameron that could run as high as $225m, the studio stands to profit by about $1.4bn. And all this from an initial investment of approximately $280m.

By now we all know what 3D can do, so bespectacled eyes now turn to next weekend, when Disney’s Alice in Wonderland opens in North America, the UK and around 40 other territories. Several years ago Avatar producer Jon Landau told me that no matter how impressive the technology at a film-maker’s disposal, 3D will only work if it enhances the story. No gratuitous audience-bound spray of missiles and rocks or cups and saucers is going to do the trick, especially now moviegoers have seen the superlative work Landau, Cameron and the effects boffins at Lightstorm, Weta Digital et al conjured on Avatar.

The future
Regardless of what people think of the 3D element (which may well be fabulous – I haven’t seen the movie yet), it’s hard to see Alice in Wonderland launching anywhere other than No 1. Tim Burton’s movie stars Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Anne Hathaway and Mia Wasikowska. Overture Films, who scored that No 3 debut with The Crazies, opens Antoine Fuqua’s crime drama Brooklyn’s Finest. The movie premiered at Sundance last year and was mired in the recession after Senator Entertainment, the company that originally bought it in Park City, collapsed. Now it is with Overture and could do well. Richard Gere, Ethan Hawke (very different from his role in Fuqua’s Training Day) and Don Cheadle star.

North American top 10, 26-28 February 2010
1. Shutter Island, $22.2m. Total: $75.1m
2. Cop Out, $18.6m
3. The Crazies, $16.5m
4. Avatar, $14m. Total: $706.9m
5. Percy Jackson & The Olympians: The Lightning Thief, $9.8m. Total: $71.2m
6. Valentine’s Day, $9.5m. Total: $100.4m
7. Dear John, $5m. Total: $72.6m
8. The Wolfman, $4.1m. Total: $57.2m
9. Tooth Fairy, $3.5m. Total: $53.9m
10. Crazy Heart, $2.5m. Total: $25.1m

Read the full review here

James Cameron’s sci-fi blockbuster got some consolation for its poor showing at the Baftas on Sunday, while Colin Firth’s award could propel A Single Man to an even more fragrant result

The winner
It may have lost the big prizes at the Baftas to The Hurt Locker, but Avatar triumphed once again at the UK box office, returning to the top spot it temporarily ceded to Valentine’s Day the previous weekend. With a haul to date of £83.27m, Avatar has already taken £14m more than the UK’s previous biggest hit, Mamma Mia!, and has spent nine of its 10 weeks on release at No 1.

Since the film is now taking negligible amounts at 2D screens, the only dark spot on its horizon is the arrival on 5 March of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, which will challenge it for 3D venues. Avatar’s distributor will, however, take comfort in the fact that Odeon is still refusing to book Alice, due to a dispute over the film’s DVD release date.

At this stage of its release, Titanic had taken 81% of its eventual total gross. If Avatar follows a similar pattern, it is set to top out around £103m. Titanic, of course, was boosted by an Oscars sweep, a feat that is now looking unlikely to be performed by Avatar.

The losers
Biggest faller on the chart was Valentine’s Day, with a 58% drop, just ahead of The Wolfman, which fell 57%. In the case of Valentine’s Day, the stumble was to be expected, since its opening weekend was boosted by stellar takings of £1.74m on Valentine’s Day itself, nearly half of its Friday-to-Sunday haul. This Sunday, it took just £379,000, a drop of 78% from 14 February. But with scorching 10-day takings of £7.78m, backers New Line/Warners won’t be too distressed.

The literary hit
Considering the sums spent on bringing Peter Jackson’s CGI-heavy vision of The Lovely Bones to the screen (at least $65m, or £42m, in production costs) and the popularity of Alice Sebold’s novel, a £1.64m UK opening might seem a tad disappointing. However, given the film’s inauspicious platform release in the US last December, the number may come as a big relief to backers Paramount.

The film was initially positioned in the US as an awards contender aimed at older upscale audiences. After some hostile reviews and a lack of enthusiasm from awards-giving bodies, Paramount reviewed its strategy and is now targeting the demographic that is proving to be its most appreciative audience: young women.

The UK opening of £1.64m compares with a debut of £1.41m for fellow femme-skewing adaptation The Time Traveler’s Wife last August, and £923,000 for My Sister’s Keeper back in June. Both films were made for more modest budgets than The Lovely Bones, though.

The arthouse battle
With a decline from the previous weekend of just 25%, A Single Man is once again the premier arthouse title, shrugging off a challenge from the not-so-well-reviewed Tolstoy family drama The Last Station. After 10 days, A Single Man has grossed a healthy £1.27m and is clearly headed for more. Colin Firth’s witty Bafta acceptance speech was a rare highlight in a dull telecast and should help propel further audiences to check out the Tom Ford-directed film. The Last Station opened with £135,000 from 66 screens, putting it one place above Precious (£1.47m to date), now in its fourth week of release. Crazy Heart, starring Jeff Bridges as a washed-up country and western singer, is a couple of notches below, with a debut of £101,000 from three screens in London and 45 in Ireland; a nationwide expansion follows on 5 March. Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman, which earned a five-star review from the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, broke the box-office records of London’s Renoir cinema with takings of £12,810 there. However, regional grosses were lacklustre, giving a £15,459 overall total from five sites.

The half-term uplift
The end of half-term is always a good time for kid flicks, with families taking their last chance to see the film before the return to school. Disney’s The Princess and the Frog went up 15% from the previous weekend, while Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief was virtually static with a 1% dip. Incredibly, on its ninth week of release, Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel went up 43%, and its total to date of £23.16m makes it the eighth biggest hit of the past year. The film added nearly £2m in the last seven days. Astro Boy also went up, by 24%.

The future
As predicted here last week, box office this weekend took a drop, thanks to a lack of commercially potent new releases. But despite this 19% dip from the previous weekend, the market overall was dead level with the equivalent period from 2009, when Confessions of a Shopaholic was the highest new entrant and Bolt the top title on its second week of release. Ahead of Alice in Wonderland, next weekend is another relatively quiet time for major new films, with the Amy Adams-Matthew Goode romcom Leap Year, John Travolta actioner From Paris With Love and viral-outbreak genre piece The Crazies among the wide releases.

UK top 10, 19-21 February
1. Avatar, £2,817,009 from 391 sites. Total: £83,265,484
2. The Princess and the Frog, £1,725,519 from 503 sites. Total: £8,873,333
3. The Lovely Bones, £1,637,579 from 420 sites (New)
4. Valentine’s Day, £1,583,142 from 436 sites. Total: £7,777,154
5. Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, £1,487,446 from 457 sites. Total: £5,225,096
6. The Wolfman, £774,890 from 411 sites. Total: £4,171,878
7. Solomon Kane, £611,886 from 259 sites (New)
8. Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel, £608,154 from 397 sites. Total: £23,164,859
9. Invictus, £570,801 from 269 sites. Total: £3,655,362
10. Astro Boy, £523,215 from 418 sites. Total: £3,102,327

How the other openers did
The Last Station, 66 screens, £135,368
Crazy Heart, 48 screens, £101,449
The Headless Woman, 5 screens, £15,459
The Unloved, 1 screen, £467
A Closed Book, no figures available

Read the full review here

Don’t talk to me about the gossip on the red carpet last night. No seriously, don’t – I couldn’t see a thing, apart from George Lamb

By now you probably know almost everything about last night’s Baftas. You know Kathryn Bigelow triumphed and that James Cameron swan-dived. You know Kate Winslet wore Stella McCartney and that Jonathan Ross seemed awkward and out of place.

I spent most of last night working the Baftas red carpet. Actually, that’s a lie. I didn’t “work” anything. What I actually did was stand in a freezing cold pen of assorted bloggers and competition winners, and together we were ignored by anyone important because we were classified as neither fans nor journalists.

Worse still, our pen was partially blocked off by the BBC3 red carpet coverage. That meant that, rather than seeing the great and good of Hollywood at their most beautiful, we were mostly treated to the sight of George Lamb from Young Butcher of the Year having his hands warmed by a flunky for hours at a time, presumably because he’s just too talented to rub them together himself. As a result, the celebrity-heavy red carpet video I planned to produce for my blog hecklerspray ended up becoming the most amateurish, puerile love letter to Lamb the world may ever see.

What the evening lost in interview opportunities, however, it more than made up for in people-watching. They say you should never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes. I say you can never really understand Meryl Streep fanatics until you have spent three hours of an arctic February evening watching them, with their We Love Meryl banner and Mamma Mia!-branded autograph books in tow, grow increasingly dejected as they begin to realise their idol isn’t going to turn up.

In fact, the Baftas crowd turned out to be a surprisingly complex organism. Seemingly shipped in from a pantomime or a Big Brother eviction, their wild cheers transformed into vicious boos whenever a celebrity had the temerity to swan past them without acknowledgement. Drop a dead goat Jurassic Park-style into one of the fan pens and it would have been stripped to the bone in seconds. Thank God for Cilla Black, then, who managed to make everything better by provoking one of the largest roars of approval of the night.

Also apparent was the fact that nobody – including myself – had the foggiest clue who anybody was. This resulted in a spectacular game of “Chinese whispers”, whereby famous names would become more and more mangled the further they spread up the carpet. By our mid-section vantage point, poor Vera Farmiga had become “Keira”, Avatar had mutated into something closer to “Burgertron”, and several A-listers were reduced to being serenaded by a kind of bellowed, noncommittal “Urrph!”

But our pen didn’t care about that. We may not have recognised anybody, but we didn’t have to: we had George Lamb. Specifically, we had Lamb’s Fame Index to count on. It was ingenious: if Lamb put his anorak on, it meant that nobody was famous enough to warrant his attention, so we could all relax. True, in the process we managed to miss Kathryn Bigelow, Claire Danes, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Clive Owen, Rebecca Hall, Armando Iannucci, Dustin Hoffman and countless others. But we did get James Corden. That’s something, isn’t it? Anyone?

Basically, there are two lessons to be learned from a stint on the Baftas red carpet. First, don’t hold awards ceremonies in London in February and, second, never trust George Lamb’s judgment.

Read the full review here