A night of sparkly distraction for most film lovers, but a veritable six-month industry in Hollywood, the Academy Awards will finally be dished out tonight. And once you've exhausted the Oscar-party cocktails and made the annual wisecracks about Sarah Jessica Parker's absurd dress, there's not much in it for you if you haven't seen the films in competition.
Happily, 19 of the nominees across various categories can now be viewed online, if you fancy doing some pre-ceremony prep work. Blinkbox has the widest range, including best picture nominee Captain Phillips, sure-fire best actress winner Blue Jasmine, best foreign film hopeful The Great Beauty and documentary favourite The Act of Killing. Amazon Instant Video (the recent reincarnation of LoveFilm), meanwhile, can help you out with Ernest & Celestine, the most lovable of long shots in the animated feature race, while it's also the place to check out my favourite of the foreign language nominees, Belgian heartbreaker The Broken Circle Breakdown.
All but one of the foreign language nominees, in fact, are available for streaming: Cambodian surprise contender The Missing Picture (an apt companion piece to The Act of Killing) can be found on Curzon on Demand, while Thomas Vinterberg's slick but highly questionable moral melodrama The Hunt (released in UK cinemas way back in 2012) has already made it to Netflix – also the place to check out best documentary The Square (my tip for an upset victory) and Dirty Wars. Yet another nominated documentary, dynamic odd-couple portrait Cutie and the Boxer, can be streamed for free on the BBC iPlayer. A number of higher-profile hopefuls, ranging from Before Midnight to The Great Gatsby to (yes) two-time nominee The Lone Ranger, are on Blinkbox and Amazon alike.
Handily, the film certain to win more Oscars tonight than any of those also arrives on DVD shelves tomorrow – by which time it may or may not be celebrating a hard-fought best picture victory. Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity (Warner, 12) was my pick for 2013's best film, though some critics have belittled this state-of-the-art space thriller about stranded astronaut Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) making her way home as little more than a thrill ride. That it is – as tactile and immersive an impression of life beyond Earth as has ever been put on screen – but beneath its impossible technical dazzle is an elemental survival drama imbued with rich spiritual curiosity and unapologetically direct human feeling.
Can it hold up in our living rooms, shorn of its overwhelming physical scale and dizzying 3D? Yes: the classical clarity of Cuarón's storytelling and the open-hearted warmth of Bullock's performance can survive any screen size, though the cinema will always be this film's mission control centre. Needless to say, the crystal-clear Blu-ray package comes with any number of compensatory bells and whistles, including a feature-length making-of documentary, and co-writer Jonás Cuarón's clever, complementary short film Aningaaq, which shifts the context of Stone's lowest emotional ebb.
No surprise, then, that it's an otherwise quiet week for DVD releases: two arthouse titles braving Gravity's ominous shadow are For Those in Peril (Soda, 18), a ponderous but dreamily visualised slab of Scots sorrow that promises greater things from director Paul Wright, and The Patience Stone (Axiom, 15), a generous-spirited fable of Middle Eastern women's liberation illuminated by Golshifteh Farahani's lead performance. No golden men are coming either film's way, but in a year when Bad Grandpa is an Oscar nominee and Blue is the Warmest Colour is not, there's no shame in that.
