Now the Oscars 2024 nominees have been announced, we would like to hear about your personal favourite

The 2025 Oscar nominations have been announced, with a record-breaking 13 for Jacques Audiard’s musical Emilia Pérez – the most ever earned by a film not in the English language .

Brady Corbet’s epic The Brutalist, about a Hungarian architect who moves to the US after the second world war, took 10 nominations, as did the musical Wicked. A Complete Unknown and Conclave both came away with eight.

From museums to wine bars, businesses are enticing consumers to carry logos on their arm. Demand is high, but the life cycle short

This year’s It bag isn’t made by any of the usual designers. And if this bag could talk, it wouldn’t say “calf leather” so much as “wash me at 40C”. What’s more, in an ideal world, you would never want to buy another again.

The “forever tote” is big business. Usually made from calico, an unbleached cotton designed to be reused, it’s similar to the cotton bags you have balled up at the bottom of a drawer, except it’s sturdy, with a reinforced base and handles, sometimes a pocket, often coloured (Yves Klein blue seems especially popular), and always conspicuously branded with logos. Demand is high.

Belfast poet of exceptional poise and eloquence – but with a sardonic streak to temper his technical accomplishment

In 1994, when rumours of an IRA ceasefire began to circulate, Michael Longley sat down and wrote what came to be regarded as one of the most prescient and significant poems of the Troubles era. Called Ceasefire , it was published originally in the Irish Times and had an immediate impact, with its much-quoted final couplet standing as a symbol of hope and reconciliation in fraught times: “I get down on my knees and do what must be done / And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.”

In this poem, Longley, who has died aged 85, drew on his classical background: a constant source of inspiration, along with the first world war, the flora and fauna of the west of Ireland, the Holocaust, love and friendship, and – obliquely – the conflict in Northern Ireland. His range was wide, and his approach distinctive. With his first collection, No Continuing City (1969), Longley showed himself to be a poet of exceptional poise and eloquence – but with a sardonic streak to temper his technical accomplishment.

From a Jennifer Lopez musical to an Ayo Edebiri horror to a provocative prison documentary, this year’s Utah-based festival has plenty to be excited about

Sundance remains one of the toughest festivals to truly predict – a smattering of unknown first-timers unfurling distributor-less films that are often shrouded in mystery – and so trying to guess what to see and what to miss of the 90-odd premieres can be something of a fool’s errand.

But a year on from a festival that gave us I Saw the TV Glow , Dìdi, My Old Ass , The Outrun and A Real Pain , there are enough reasons to suggest that this edition will be just as impressive. Here are the 10 I have my eye on right now:

Prague Radio SO/Popelka
(Supraphon, three CDs)
Petr Popelka brings assured intensity to Smetana’s homage to his homeland, but it’s his appreciation of the Czech composer’s other works that sets this apart

Smetana’s career as an orchestral composer divides into two more or less distinct phases, separated by the decade from 1862-72 when he was preoccupied with opera. It was the composition of the cycle of nationalistic symphonic poems Má Vlast (My Homeland), completed in 1879, that brought Smetana back to the orchestra: those six works quickly became his most widely known orchestral scores, and the Prague Radio Symphony’s performances of them, bristling with energy and vivid intent when required, rightly take pride of place in Petr Popelka’s survey of the major orchestral works.

But the CD catalogue is already well furnished with outstanding versions of Má Vlast, both from other Czech orchestras and further afield , and it’s Popelka’s performances of the other works here that single this set out as thoroughly worthwhile. Taking up one of the three discs, the Festive Symphony Op 6, which Smetana composed in 1853 and 1854 to celebrate the wedding of Emperor Franz Joseph I, is generally unremarkable, with its debts to a whole range of early 19th-century models – Weber, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Beethoven – all too obvious. But the symphonic poems that followed in the late 1850s, after an encounter with Liszt and all based on literary sources, mark the real emergence of Smetana’s mature style. As Popelka’s intensely dramatic readings demonstrate, all three pieces – Richard III, after Shakespeare’s play; Wallenstein’s Camp, after Schiller; and Hakon Jarl, based on Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger’s tragedy – deserve to be heard outside Czechia far more often than they are.

Daniel Pioro/Manchester Camerata/Michael Morpurgo
(Platoon)
The violinist’s rethinking of Vivaldi’s best known work includes four new poems by (and read by) Michael Morpurgo but, placed together at the start of the disc, the music and poetry feels disconnected

‘I think the piece is so much more interesting than we give it credit for,” says violinist Daniel Pioro of Vivaldi’s best known and endlessly reinterpreted work. “I wanted this recording to be a sonic devotion to the ecosystem around us and an ode to the imagination of Antonio Vivaldi.” One of Pioro’s ways of making Four Seasons more “interesting” is to add readings of four specially commissioned poems by Michael Morpurgo, inspired by the sonnets that were found on the manuscript parts of the Four Seasons that are now in the Henry Watson Music Library in Manchester. But Pioro also embroiders the solo violin part by improvising around it, introducing folksy elements and quarter tones, in ways that sometimes obscure and sometimes even obliterate the shapes of Vivaldi’s phrases.

Oddly, Morpurgo’s readings of all four poems are placed together first on the disc, before the performance of the concertos, rather than interleaved with them, as logic might suggest. Consequently, the two elements – poems and music – seem more disconnected than they might be. As for the performance, the clipped playing of the Manchester Camerata provides a crisp backdrop to Pioro’s solos, however indulgent those sometimes seem.

As the 78-year-old star tours his latest solo LP, he answers your questions on his Everton terrace anthem, the making of I’m Not in Love and hosting Joey Ramone in Stockport

Do 10cc deserve more recognition for their contribution to forward-thinking music in the 70s? In my mind, you were up there with Sparks and Roxy Music – and way ahead of Queen. Flashbleu
I agree, but Queen had two very identifiable things in Brian May’s guitar and Freddie Mercury’s vocals. In 10cc, we had three No 1s [Rubber Bullets, I’m Not in Love and Dreadlock Holiday] with three different singers! Also, we were never a showbiz kind of band, but Queen are still performing with Adam Lambert and I’m touring our catalogue, so it shows that we’ve both stood the test of time. The songs are the stars of the show, really.

How on earth did you write For Your Love, Heart Full of Soul and Evil Hearted You for the Yardbirds as a teenager? Deckard85
From the age of 11, when I got my first guitar, music was it for me. I wasn’t good at school and my parents didn’t force me to go to university, because they recognised that songwriting is a gift and I was lucky enough to have it. At that age, I was listening to Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, the Everly Brothers, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and then guitar players like Hank Marvin with the Shadows. All my contemporaries have exactly the same influences. Then, of course, the Beatles. So you put it all together.

His new film, The Seed of the Sacred Fig, is up for an Academy award – but the film-maker had to direct it from his sofa. Even under sentence of arrest and flogging, he won’t be silenced, he says

When mass protests erupted in Iran after the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who had been detained for not properly wearing her hijab, Mohammad Rasoulof was in jail. By night, out of earshot of the guards, the Iranian director – incarcerated for being critical of the government – and his fellow political prisoners gathered to discuss the turmoil unfolding outside. As the protests intensified and the number of detainees grew, a general pardon was issued and Rasoulof was released.

His time in jail helped inspire his new film: a drama about a paranoid state investigator who turns on his own family. Rasoulof had been mulling over versions of it for 15 years, fearing it was “too ambitious”. Free from prison, he set to work – but this time, in complete secret. He directed The Seed of the Sacred Fig almost entirely from his own sofa, using a broadband connection registered under someone else’s name.

Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London
Inspired ideas abound in Jennifer Tang’s production but, among all the plotting, betting and baiting, it doesn’t quite all come together

Shakespeare’s early British monarch is reimagined as a queen heading a matriarchy – and overseeing the mother of all dysfunctional “blended” families. Her queer daughter, Innogen (Gabrielle Brooks), has married her girlfriend, Posthumus (Nadi Kemp-Sayfi) without Cymbeline’s permission. Her second husband, Duke (Silas Carson), is plotting against his wife and manoeuvring to line up his son, Cloten (Jordan Mifsúd), for the throne. Both parents are trying to get their children – step-siblings – to marry.

The production’s gender inversions are set amid Shakespeare’s melodrama, involving everything from poison plotting by the Duke to the kidnapping of royal children and Cymbeline’s war with Rome. Among it all, the matriarchy does not quite resonate in its significance or even feel especially revisionist, perhaps because the play’s prevailing themes speak of family relationships and parental responsibility over an examination of power – the latter is not prominently examined here.