Although women were once again in the minority among this year’s Oscar nominees, and there was very little of teh gay on show (ironic, really), there were a few highlights among the winners which might catch the discerning Gaelick reader’s eye. Here’s a selection

The Oscar nominations were revealed earlier this week and the actress categories are looking strong. It will be hard to predict who is going to go home with an Oscar this year but let’s take a look at the contenders.

This week saw Roadside Attractions and Liddell Entertainment announce that they had purchased full US rights to Glenn Close’s Albert Nobbs. A movie in which Close plays a woman passing as a man in 19th Century Dublin. Could there be an Oscar in Glenn’s future?

A quick run-down of the things not hitting the headlines because men and women in bad suits are too busy wittering on about the economy. There is good news as well as bad, for example in the UK Gordon Brown supports equality yet a gay man is killed in a homophobic attack.

Doubt comes to Irish cinemas with some serious credentials; four Oscar nominations for the four main roles and one for John Patrick Shanley’s adaptation of his own play. The fact that it won none of them, says more for our need for a happy ending than it does about the quality of this sombre piece of work.

Based on Richard Yates’ classic American novel Revolutionary Road (1961), Sam Mendes’ film is as searing an indictment of American married life in the suburbs. April (Kate Winslet) and Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio) consider themselves to be superior to their neighbours – they could be artists, intellectuals, bohemians – they just happen to be playing the part of an attractive young couple with two children living in the pretty house on Revolutionary Road, a Connecticut suburb, in the mid 1950s.