My bright college years in America were roughly the epoch of Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche.  I never read the book, whose title was on the lips of my contemporaries as a kind of mantra of masculinity. But it wasn’t as though they sensed what the future held.  The magic, I reckon, lay simply in the innate ridiculousness of the word “quiche,” so swishy, hissy, and, as one might reflect now, forty years later, tranny.  Just say the silly word and straightaway you’re in the audience of RuPaul’s Drag Race.

Some years ago, when my wife and I were in London, a car passed by at full tilt as we stood on a street corner by Sloane Square. The passengers inside were amusing themselves by throwing ball bearings out the window.  One pea-sized steel ball flew just inches from Olga’s face and crashed into the asphalt at our feet.

Seeing that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences understands film about as much as the United Nations understands anything, this week I’m giving out my own Oscars.  Admittedly my choices are the haul of a lifetime rather than of a single year gone by, as I haven’t been to the cinema or watched a film by any other means for at least a decade.