First up, Catherine Shoard and Xan Brooks join Jason Solomons to take a punt on the likely winners at this weekend's Oscars, and who they'd like to win. The critics' predictions are all over the map – Jason wraps himself in the union flag and plumps for An Education, Carey Mulligan and Colin Firth for best picture, best actress and best actor; Xan Brooks sticks to his guns for The Hurt Locker and Jeff Bridges; while Catherine Shoard suspects the Academy voters will go for Hollywood favourites Meryl Streep, Morgan Freeman and Quentin Tarantino.
Next, the young French director Mia Hansen-Løve tells Jason about her new film, her first to be released in the UK. Father of My Children is inspired by the admired, charismatic French film producer Humbert Balsan, who brought Middle Eastern directors such as Elia Suleiman, Youssef Chahine and Youssry Nasrallah to an international audience. Hansen-Løve reveals her own debt to Balsan, and shares why she decided to shoot the film in Paris's noisiest arrondissement.
Xan and Jason then run the rule over the week's key films: they are split on Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (Xan found it infectious, Jason thought it tedious), admire the British indie portrait of life in a band 1234 and deliver a unanimous thumbs down to Uma Thurman as a blogging parent in Motherhood.
And finally, Soda Pictures managing director Ed Fletcher tells Jason about a new initiative called New British Cinema Quarterly, an attempt to create new distribution solutions for small-budget British independent films. The initiative has hooked up with 15 key independent venues around the country to digitally show the selected films, accompanied by Q&As with the people behind the films.
