The missing ingredient in the big ticket movies of 2021

The Bafta and Oscar nominees are brilliant but for the one problem

Writer-director Emerald Fennell, left, and actress Carey Mulligan pose for a portrait to promote their film "Promising Young Woman" during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah on January 25, Show more

In the past few weeks I’ve been watching a load of films in the run up to the Bafta and Oscar awards, and it’s been an odd experience. Normally – if any of us can remember ‘normally’ any more – those of us who are Bafta members can go to private movie theatres in the centre of London and see the likely award winners weeks before the films go on general release, or we can catch up with any we missed. During Covid-19 that has been impossible.

Instead of viewing movies on big screens with friends and a live audience, we have all been sitting at home alone, watching online on laptops. Despite the fact that there are some truly great movies this year, it has been, for me at least, a very dispiriting couple of months because the shortlisted movies have been so often miserable and so lacking in mischief or good simple fun. Watching even some great performances and imaginatively directed features during the lockdown has been like taking part in an endless film fiesta of misery.

During lockdown, amid daily death and infection figures, no one needs any more unhappiness, and faced with it I have been suffering acute empathy failure. I began to long for the genius of romantic comedies of years gone by, of Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot, or the daft cheerfulness of Notting Hill, or maybe the kind of good humoured chase of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the clever idiocy of The Big Lebowski. Instead it's been a pool of despair.

The Bafta winner Nomadland, for example, is stunning. Brilliant. Revelatory. And relentlessly grim. It has a harsh documentary style, directed by Chloe Zhao and starring Frances McDormand, following the destruction of lives caused by the financial crash and the post-2008 recession that followed. Ordinary decent Americans end up losing their homes, living a trailer-park existence working in dead-end jobs. True, like most movies-of-misery this year, Nomadland has a heart of gold, but it was exhausting and I wanted it to end.

Or there is a fine British film, County Lines. A decent young lad is ensnared into selling drugs and ends inevitably in a world of horrific violence, modestly relieved by some love at the end. Or there is Riz Ahmed's performance as a rock music drummer in Sound of Metal – a drummer who is becoming deaf. Or Judas and the Black Messiah – the story of a charismatic young African-American leader in the Black Panthers, a man betrayed by one of those he trusted.

Or Carey Mulligan's superb performance in Promising Young Woman. It's a revenge comedy – well, sort of – brilliantly uncomfortable as an exploration of the ways in which predatory men often escape responsibility for abusing women. It's an important yet grim theme, and such has been the movie-misery of the past two months Mulligan was one of the few who raised some smiles.

I found every single one of these films (and many more) admirable, but not truly enjoyable. I cheered the fact that two of the best directors are women – Emerald Fennell for Promising Young Woman and Chloe Zhao for Nomadland – and that an African American director, Shaka King, was recognised for the gripping tale of Judas and the Black Messiah.

At last awards ceremonies are featuring more diversity of talent in the movie industry. And I cheered that great social themes – attitudes to women, to workers, to people of colour – were being explored. But there was a missing ingredient in almost all the movies I’ve watched in 2021: relaxed entertainment.

Movies always have something to say about the times in which they were created. Busby Berkeley's extraordinarily choreographed great fantasies in his Gold Digger series were Hollywood's escape from the misery of the Great Depression of the 1930s.

James Bond movies were rooted in the neurosis of the Cold War, although the genius of Ian Fleming was to transfer the struggle between good and evil into one between the glamorous Bond and various eccentric corporate villains – Goldfinger, Dr No and the rest.

This year’s short listed films are unfortunately out of step with the zeitgeist of a world immersed in various kinds of lockdowns. We have enough to worry about, before relaxing to view even these superb movie tales of racism, economic depression, and sexual exploitation.

I longed to escape into various kinds of fantasy rather than confront the other ills of reality. But it’s not the moviemakers’ fault. Big budget movies can take two or more years from inception until they hit the cinemas. This year’s crop of Bafta and Oscar award winners were conceived in 2019 or earlier, long before most of us even heard the word coronavirus.

Maybe next year I'll be able genuinely to appreciate Nomadland or Sound of Metal, but for now I confess the films I have most enjoyed watching are the old Harry Potter series with my children, plus comical animations of various kinds. Escapism? Yes, sure. How about you?

Gavin Esler is a broadcaster and UK columnist for The National