This is The Guardian.

Everything leading up to the Oscars is an audition for the Oscars.

It's now a sort of tipping point.

It's very rare that the best film will win.

But I think this campaign perhaps does show the sort of real genuine risks of gaffes.

And I don't want to be working in ballet or opera or, you know, things where it's like,

hey, keep this thing alive even though no one cares about this anymore.

He's so marmite as a person.

Had the opera thing come out a couple of days earlier, it absolutely would have

totaled distances. With something like sinners, I think to not give him best director would be

terrible. Remember, no black person has ever won best director. The Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles

is rolling out the red carpet again for this year's Oscar's ceremony on Sunday. So who should win and why?

From The Guardians today in focus, this is the latest with me, Lucy Hart.

I'm joined by Catherine Shored, the Guardian's film editor. It's great to see you, Catherine. Thanks for coming up.

So we are at the end of what has felt like quite a long Oscars campaign trail. It feels

like it's a real face-off between two films at this point, doesn't it? Sinners and one

battle after another. How would you describe the dynamics of the race at this point? Yeah,

it's got very exciting just in the final reel, just as the final crunch has happened.

And there's a number of reasons for that. One of them is that the, there's a new rule that if you're an Oscar voter this year, you have to prove that you've actually seen the films that you're going to be voting. You wouldn't think you'd do that. Was that not normally the case? You know what people are like, dreadful. So, but you can't literally, can't physically sort of click it, click that one, until you've sort of shown that you've watched the others.

So that means a huge flurry of late votes, which makes the last of three weeks very, very

important.

So Oscar voting closed, I think, a week yesterday.

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