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There's an episode of 'Frasier' where his brother Niles is excited to be nominated for a Seabee - Seattle's coveted radio award. Frasier is hosting the awards ceremony and is also nominated. However when Niles turns up, he soon realises he isn't present at the main ceremony. Instead he's directed to the Napoleon Room in the hotel which is "just down to the basement, cross through the kitchen to the hall" to a room named after the French Emperor "because its ceiling is low". Later, after realising he was a nominee in the technical awards, Niles is excited to see wine at the main ceremony which they didn't serve at his. "You see, I was the only nominee dressed in black tie, except for the one man in front wearing a tuxedo T-Shirt," he mournfully tells his brother. "At least, I didn't come home empty handed.  "We each received one of these handsome certificates, which were given out after we'd folded our tables an

In previous years, Guillermo del Toro's 'Nightmare Alley' could have been a contender. It may be a Best Picture Oscar nominee this year but its hopes of taking the top prize are faint, at best. Why is that so? 'Nightmare Alley' is arguably the most stylish of the ten nominees. It boasts an accomplished cast who turn in terrific performances. But in a year when ' The Power of the Dog ' and ' CODA ' - and to some extent ' Belfast '  - have grabbed all the attention, it hasn't really figured as an awards season frontrunner. Maybe Hollywood feels with ' The Shape of Water 's Best Picture Oscar win in 2018, del Toro has had his time in the sun. Adapted for the big screen by the Mexican director and Kim Morgan from William Lindsey Gresham's 1946 novel of the same name, 'Nightmare Alley' is a neo-noir tale of confidence tricksters in a travelling carnival. Set in 1939, a perfectly cast Bradley Cooper plays Stan Carlisle, a dr

It's becoming harder to predict Best Picture at the Academy Awards  That's not a cop out.  It's a fact. As  Scott Feinberg rightly pointed out earlier this year in the Hollywood Reporter  between 20 and 25 per cent of the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences come from outside the US and they are largely not represented on the other bodies that hand out prizes during awards season. That means the Golden Globes, SAGs, Producers Guild, Directors Guild and BAFTAs have become less accurate as indicators of the Best Picture race. The composition of those bodies has changed. Feinberg notes that SAG voters include radio personalities, meteorologists and TikTok stars, while BAFTA's nominations are decided by a series of specialist panels for acting, directing etc. That explains some of the wild variations that have occurred this year in terms of the various nominations. After all, how do you explain Catriona Balfe's remarkable Best Supporting Actress Os

The dramatic life and death of Princess Diana seems tailor made for novels, plays and films. Many writers have responded to the challenge - although a lot of preferred to dwell on the events surrounding her death. Those have included the publication of thrillers like Aaron McCallum Becker's 'Whose Death in the Tunnel?', Tom Cain's 'The Accident Man' and Eoin McNamee's '12:23 - Paris: 31st August 1997'. Other novelists have opted for afterlife tales like Elizabeth Dewbury's 'The Lovely Wife' and Emma Tennant and Hillary Bailey's 'Diana: The Ghost Biography'. Isabelle Rivere and Caroline Babert's 'Lady D' took a different tack, speculating on what her life might have been like had she been able to walk away from the accident in Paris unscathed. Onstage, David Bryan and Joe DiPietro tried to turn the Princess's life story into a musical 'Diana' which opened in San Diego in 2019 and then Broadway but mostly