What’s that? Joan Crawford had no sense of humour? Well, take a look at It's A Great Feeling. It’s a pretty bizarre (and pretty bad) 1949 musical with Jack Carson and Dennis Morgan playing themselves running round the Warner Brothers lot attempting to make a picture.

French director Michel Hazanavicius made a name for himself with his OSS 117 spy spoofs, Nest of Spies (2006) and Lost in Rio (2009), set in the Fifties and Sixties respectively and starring Jean Dujardin as a somewhat idiotic and prejudiced secret agent. But it was with The Artist in 2011 that he hit the jackpot, marrying his gift for period recreation with a story of genuine depth and warmth.

Is #MeSnooze a hashtag? It could well be for those who sat through the 90th annual Academy Awards, an Oscar night so reined in by the current climate in Hollywood that it was as if all the fun and frolics had been leached out of a ceremony always at its best when it lets in a teensy bit of the lowbrow, or at least allows for the unexpected.

The unpredictable was certainly the case last year. The Best Picture cock-up (the so-called Envelopegate) wasn’t going to happen twice in a row, even if Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway were invited back to do the honours: “Presenting is lovelier the second time around,” Dunaway deadpanned. Indeed, Guillermo del Toro rather sweetly checked to make sure that the card was accurate before stepping to the podium to give thanks for his film, The Shape of Water, winning Best Picture. The top prize was in this instance easily the most competitive of the night, with many expecting Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri or even Get Out to squeak in at the final moment. (The Shape of Water, which won four Oscars in all, was the evening's big winner, followed by Dunkirk with three, all in technical categories.)

By the point del Toro made the second of his two visits to the stage, a long evening (nearly four hours) had some while before run out of juice. Perhaps as if in understandable obedience to movements that hadn’t been named this time last year, Hollywood’s annual paean to itself has rarely seemed so muted. Sure, there was the offer of a jet ski for the presenter who gave the shortest speech (step up Mark Bridges, the costume designer for Phantom Thread), and host Jimmy Kimmel announced that he would time all the speeches instead of allowing the orchestra to drown them out: Bridges’ lasted 36 seconds.

But somewhere past the halfway mark, prolix winners were indeed given a musical prompt to hurry up. By that point, too, one had begun to notice that Kimmel often seemed strangely absent from his own second consecutive hosting gig, having promised at the end of last year never to come back. From an opening monologue comparatively light on comedy and thick with an earnest reminder of where the industry has got to now, one felt the evening all but buckling under the weight of having to toe the correct line. During one of his wanderings through the audience Kimmel asked Steven Spielberg if he had any pot. You wondered whether a collective toke might do everyone some good.

The very start – with contemporary faces folded into retro-style visuals in keeping with the Oscars’ nine decades – was a great idea given insufficient room or space to build: think how much Johnny Carson and Billy Crystal would have done with the same material. Or how much more relaxed such presenters as Tiffany Haddish (Girls Trip) and The Big Sick’s Kumail Nanjiani seemed in the face of #MeToo, #TimesUp and a newly enlightened climate that brought out the impassioned trio of Annabella Sciorra, Salma Hayek and Ashley Judd, three of the many women who have levelled allegations of sexual abuse at the producer Harvey Weinstein. (For the record Weinstein was namechecked during the show while Woody Allen and Kevin Spacey, among others, were not. Oh, and Mike Pence was, though Donald Trump wasn’t – at least directly. Lord knows how the Orange One feels about Mexican filmmakers winning the directing Oscar four out of the last five years: mandatory cheeseburgers for everyone, one fears.)

Even the redoubtable Frances McDormand (pictured above), kicking off with her now-familiar strategy at such events of informing us that she had “something to say”, closed out her Best Actress remarks with talk of an “inclusion rider” – an industry-speak reference that sent everyone scurrying to Google. Oh for the comparative brio and passion she brought to the stage when she won her first Oscar 21 years ago for Fargo: the rhetoric, or McDormand's delivery of it, is looking ever so slightly canned, though it was a nice touch when she encouraged all the female nominees in the auditorium to stand. Meryl Streep, with 21 nominations the prevailing female Oscar grandee, immediately led McDormand’s call, and the other women directly followed. (Streep, incidentally, now seems to occupy the prime position in a seat down-centre that for years went to her Ironweed co-star, Jack Nicholson.)

The roll call of winners was pro forma pretty well down the line: the trophies themselves were awarded across an array of films, with Lady Bird among the few that was entirely shut out. All four acting awards followed expected protocol, the Academy missing a golden opportunity to honour on the same night Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour) and the first of his five wives, Phantom Thread’s Lesley Manville.

And though the enthusiasm inside the Dolby Theatre for nominees Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out) and Timothee Chalamet (Call Me By Your Name) might have suggested an Adrien Brody-style upset, Oldman’s Winston Churchill once again prevailed, just as McDormand and Sam Rockwell did for Three Billboards and Alison Janney’s LaVona Golden (from I, Tonya) did for supporting actress. “I did it all by myself,” Janney said once she got to the stage, pausing for effect before issuing a correction: “Nothing could be further from the truth.” And though the self-seriousness of the evening seems to work against discussion of the nominees’ sartorial choices, Janney did look a lot more comfortable here than several weeks ago at the Baftas. Gone, thank heavens, was the collar ready to behead her at any second. 

There were undeniable delights scattered here and there. It was wonderful to see the great Roger Deakins finally awarded for cinematography for Blade Runner 2049, his 14th nomination, just as one was heartened by the cheers for Mudbound’s Rachel Morrison – the first woman ever nominated in the cinematography category. The two British winners, themselves a couple, for live action short film for The Silent Child were eloquence and grace personified, and one can only assume that the subject of their film, six-year-old Maisie Sly, had some while before gone to bed.

Eva Marie Saint, who won an Oscar for On the Waterfront in 1955, at age 93 handled presenting chores with aplomb, and Broadway regular Keala Settle once again proved the undeniably galvanic power of best song nominee “This Is Me” from The Greatest Showman, which brought an ovation-happy audience once again to its feet. In context, the fact that the award actually went to “Remember Me” from Coco (a winner as well for animated film) remains a head-scratcher given that all four of the other song nominees came across better in performance. (Gael Garcia Bernal’s pitch troubles didn’t help the “Remember Me” cause.)

And to be honest, once all the appeals to inclusivity, immigrants, and a kinder, fairer Hollywood had quite sensibly and aptly been made, one still found oneself wishing for just a tiny bit of vulgarity or something truly lively that might at least knock at the door of the prevailing constraint. Del Toro – as gifted a speech-giver as the film industry has these days – got some of the way there in his buoyant shout-out to youth across society “showing us how things are done”. But I have a hunch there was a silent nod of assent when Oldman, paying tribute to his 98-year-old mum back in Britain, urged her to “put the kettle on”. By that point, we all could have used a drink.

Overleaf: the full Academy Awards results

Clio Barnard has quietly been building a reputation as one of Britain’s most human storytellers. Her debut feature The Arbor was a mesmerising look at the life of playwright Andrea Dunbar, blurring the line between documentary and performance.

The Viennale is one of the best film festivals in the world and an indispensable part of Vienna’s cultural life. Yet this year’s edition was launched amid trying times.

In July we launched a competition in association with The Hospital Club to unearth talented young critics. We were clear about what we were looking for: “We want to read reviews that make us think – provocative, entertaining writing that gets under the skin of the art it addresses, that dares to ask uncomfortable questions and offer new answers. We’re looking for a review we wish we’d written ourselves. Surprise us, shock us, enrage us.”

It’s fitting that the first name on The Hospital Club's h.Club 100 film list for 2017 is that of Ken Loach. But though the director has a cinema career of more than half a century behind him – and had even officially retired before he came back to make I, Daniel Blake – his presence here is in no sense a Lifetime Achievement award. If you follow the adage, “You’re only as good as your last film”, this was Loach at his urgent best.

In his biography The Magic Lantern, Ingmar Bergman recalls his first encounter with the Swedish island of Fårö, in 1960, when location scouting for his next film, Through A Glass Darkly. A last, desperate bid by the film’s producers to find a cheaper setting than Orkney turned out to be fortuitous in more ways than they could have imagined.

The sleepy, picturesque Czech spa town of Karlovy Vary (formally Carlsbad) wakes up every July to the noisy bustle of one of Europe's oldest, largest and most vibrant film festivals. Backpack-toting youngsters come from all over the Czech Republic to see as many as six movies a day and then party through the night.

If one were to stop at the title, My Life as a Courgette – from the French Ma vie de Courgette and unsurprisingly renamed for those insular Americans as My Life As a Zucchini – could be too easily dismissed as a juvenile or childlike frivolity. And that would be to under-estimate this French-Swiss, Oscar-nominated, stop-motion animation, which is one of the more profound, touching and daring family films of recent years.

Based on the French novel Autobiography of a Courgette by Gilles Paris, it follows the fortunes of a nine-year-old boy, Icare, nicknamed Courgette by his alcoholic mother, maliciously or not we’ll never know since the film opens with the lonely lad accidentally killing his single parent, while playing with one of her empty beer cans.

When Courgette is sent to an orphanage, where he meets the fellow victims of a variety of social problems – drug addiction, mental illness, crime, child abuse and deportation – the story seems primed for the usual descent into state-sponsored despair. But just for once these kids are in safe hands.

The film’s Swiss first-time director, Claude Barras, studied illustration with the intention of becoming an illustrator for children’s books, but changed course when he met and was trained by the animator Georges Schwizgebel. He then teamed with the Belgian writer/director Cédric Louis, with whom he made a number of short animations.

Barras’s screenwriter for Courgette, Frenchwoman Céline Sciamma, already has a formidable reputation as a writer/director of three feature films, the perceptive, atypical coming-of-age dramas Water Lilies, Tomboy and Girlhood.

The pair spoke to theartsdesk about their collaboration.

DEMETRIOS MATHEOU: Gilles Paris’s book was aimed at adults. Why did you decide to broaden the audience, and turn this tough subject into a family film.

CLAUDE BARRAS: To be completely honest, my producers said that if we made the film only for adults we would have a hard time finding the financing. At the same time, I had noticed that there was not much diversity in children’s films, which are mainly about entertainment. Maybe we think we need to constantly entertain children, because we’re ashamed of the world we’re offering them. But since I love Ken Loach’s films and the Dardennes brothers' films, I thought perhaps I could make a social realist film for children.

The main subject is violence, so it’s important to talk about violence and show what the children have been confronted by. It’s a delicate subject for kids, but it’s something they are confronted by in everyday life – in the playground at school, what they see on television and on the internet. And I thought that to tell a story that breaks this chain of violence, and brings hope, was a beautiful thing to try to do.

CÉLINE SCIAMMA: Claude was always telling me it’s "Ken Loach for kids".

Ken Loach doesn’t hold back from criticising the state. But I understand that the film is lighter than the book, less critical of the childcare system in France.

SCIAMMA: I don’t know about less critical, because the book was also a tribute to social workers. And social workers have said about the film that yes, this is how it is in an ideal way, when the system works it can be like that. We’re not making a fantasy world. And each of the kids in the film has a profile that is very harsh, yet true, all kinds of abuses are being represented. So we’re not being shy.

BARRAS: In cinema orphanages are typically depicted as places of abuse, and the outside world as that of freedom, for example in The 400 Blows, or The Chorus. In My Life As a Courgette that pattern has been reversed: abuse is suffered in the outside world and the orphanage is a place encouraging appeasement and reconstruction. After some time immersed in a foster care centre, I realised the importance of treating the theme with great care, because the homeis at the heart of the relationship that these children, who have been lacking in affection, maintain with the adult world.

Presumably a key challenge was to take this initially bleak material and present it in a way that wouldn’t disturb or confuse young audiences?

SCIAMMA: It was all about the beginning of the film – because at the beginning you have to kill the mother and make a point about the boy’s social background. I didn’t continue with the writing until I found a way to do that. When I had the idea of this little kid playing a game with empty beer cans, I realised ‘this is the film’.

It’s about synthesising emotions, avoiding contrasts. For instance, if you take a strong narrative in animation, like The Lion King, there are these very sad scenes – with that film around the death of the father – and then scenes with kind, funny animals. We didn’t work that way, a light scene and a heavy scene. Our narrative is about telling all the emotions at the same time.

Almost treating the young kids as grown ups?

SCIAMMA: Of course. The goal of the film was to take children very seriously as characters, in the writing, and to take children very seriously as an audience, believing in their intelligence.

What did you want youngsters to get out of it?

SCIAMMA: A sense of solidarity. It’s a movie about friendship, I think it’s a tribute to tolerance, to being welcoming, which is quite an issue today. It’s about how you can love and be loved, even when you’ve had a very wrong start in life. It’s also about what a family is, or can be, how we bond.

How did you get together on this?

BARRAS: I read the book 10 years ago and fell in love with it. There was a six-year period in which I was developing the idea, while working on other projects. After these six years I met a producer who agreed to do the project, then the producer put me in contact with Céline. I’d just seen Tomboy (pictured below) a few months before, and so was immediately enthusiastic.

In the book there are 20 children and I chose seven to tell the story. But I’m not a scriptwriter. I’d written a first version, then gave Céline entire freedom to do what she wanted. She kept some ideas, but simplified the story, made sure that each of  the children had some time, added subtleties. Céline knew how to strike the right balance between humour and emotion, adventure and social realism.

SCIAMMA: Reading Claude’s first draft and the book I felt a strong connection between my work and this material, because it’s not just about youth, but youth at the margin. And there’s a strong social context to it, you can still be political and make propositions.

Claude, are you principally the director, or also one of the animators?

BARRAS: I do practice animation sometimes, but I’m not very good at it. My main role is director and character design.

So how did you set about the character design for this? Does it reflect previous work?

BARRAS: I’ve collaborated in the past with an illustrator, Albertine, who makes very joyful work, very colourful. I also did all this work with Cédric Louis which is more similar to what Tim Burton does, the dark aspect of his design. But Tim Burton’s films have a lot of fantasy in them, whereas, as I said, I think my film is closer to social realism. Another source of inspiration is Nick Park’s Creature Comforts, which is a masterpiece. I see in Courgette a mix of all these different elements.

What to do think the choice of stop animation lends to the storytelling?

BARRAS: I think it’s extremely simple and easy to convey emotions to the audience with this form. It’s both easy for the viewer to see the expression changing and for the animator who’s manipulating the puppets, who can change the whole expression with one move.

These faces remind me of emoticons. I think they balance a very realistic, tough story, bring some softness to it and perhaps some hope.

Overleaf: watch the trailer for My Life as a Courgette