Hollywood's sweetheart Sandra Bullock's Oscar-baiting performance in The Blind Side has paid off. She's got her nomination and if you ask me, this is her year, even if there's the abiding fear that somewhere around the corner, just as there always is for every decent Sandra Bullock film, a cinematic equivalent of its half-made mutant twin (you know, something like All About Steve, or The Proposal) is waiting to spring from the shadows.

Slacker and stoners revere him as the Dude. Kids love him as a video game character in Tron and a comic book villain in Iron Man. Grown ups like him too: Terry Gilliam says if he could he would work with him in every film he made, and after The Fisher King you can see why. And now, finally Jeff Bridges is up for an Academy Award. So why the nod after all this time? Was it the plucking and the singing?

As directorial calling cards go, Samantha Morton's brilliant debut The Unloved demands a bigger screen than the TV scale version it recently premiered on. The film gets a limited cinema release this week and reminds us just what an extraordinary talent Morton has already shown us as an actor in films ranging from Morvern Callar to Minority Report, and even in Harmony Korine's Mister Lonely.

If you die at the movies where do you go? Robin Williams had a look in What Dreams May Come, David Niven in A Matter of Life and Death, Mimi Rogers and David Duchovny went the distance in The Rapture, and in The Lovely Bones Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson gives us his digital version of the afterlife. But where do you think is the best celluloid resting place?

As Miyazaki's wonderful Ponyo arrives in UK cinemas, what lessons can we draw from a recent spate of animations that include a stop motion George Clooney in The Fantastic Mr Fox, an octegenarian lead character in Pixar's Up, and a hand-drawn heroine in Disney's The Princess and the Frog?

Oil City Confidential brilliantly tells the story of legendary Canvey Island rockers Dr Feelgood, and is a solid joy from start to finish. But do you have to dig the rock to dig the "rockumentary"?

You may think there is no science in the necessity of violence to the entertainment value of an action flick such as Ninja Assassin but drawing on my years of experience knee deep in gore, and modelling from key texts such as Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, Sylvester Stallone's Rambo, Peter Jackson's Brain Dead and, er, Mary Poppins, I shall attempt to make my case.

Think a quarter century of film criticism doesn't entitle a person to make predictions of Academy Award winners? Wanna bet?