Bradley Cooper

Of the many inevitables of Oscar season, one certainty is that the film or filmmakers perceived to be the front-runner will find themselves in a spot of difficulty before the awards ceremony. There is a legion of highly paid, aggressive publicists whose job is not only to promote their clients’ interests, but also to rubbish the competition. Granted, an Oscar is no longer the path to box-office success it once was — I’m not sure that anyone was rushing out to see CODA or Nomadland after their awards, not least because there was so little competition in the pandemic era — but it will add millions to an asking rate, instill lasting gravitas and ensure a movie’s lasting reputation. Many people really, really want to win an Oscar.

After the debacle of Jo Koy’s appalling, worst-ever hosting of this year’s Golden Globes ceremony, the organizers of the Academy Awards are probably patting themselves on the back in the knowledge that they’ve successfully hired safe-pair-of-hands Jimmy Kimmel for this year’s ceremony. Yes, alas, because his joke-nemesis Matt Damon features in this year’s dead-cert winner Oppenheimer, there will be the public continuation of the smuggest and least amusing fake feud in contemporary life, but at least Kimmel won’t offend anyone, knows how to deliver a carefully scripted punchline and can be relied upon to keep things moving at a lick.

Long before he was helming multimillion-dollar franchises, director James Gunn made an indie movie called Super. Starring Rainn Wilson (of The Office fame), Super was a nasty little send-up of the superhero genre that deconstructed familiar motifs long before The Boys hit screens. It shoved audiences’ faces into the violence often underlying the genre’s tropes, with a depth of brutality not easily sanitized away. But times change, careers advance — and Gunn is now the power behind marquee events like The Suicide Squad and the Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy. He was recently tapped to lead DC Comics’ cinematic efforts in a new direction. Yet despite it all, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 has far more in common with Super and The Suicide Squad than its two forerunners.