Kate Winslet, playing a caricature version of herself in the BBC comedy series Extras, declared cynically that the best way to an Oscar is either by playing a "mental" or being in a Holocaust movie. She took her own advice, it seems and, having already hyperventilated at the Golden Globes, now looks likely to clean up at the Academy Awards for her portrayal of a former concentration camp guard in Stephen Daldry's adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's novel The Reader. I haven't read the book, and if the screen version is faithful, I'm not moved to. Told largely in flashback, and framed by the ice-cold presence of Ralph Fiennes, it is the story of how one man's life is affected by an affair he had as a teenager with an older woman (Winslet) whose dark secret is only revealed to him when, some years later, she stands trial for war crimes.

I am sure - indeed am told - that there are layers and layers of nuance to this rather protracted tale, that it explores the second-generation Germans' feelings about the war and their forebears' part in it. Crude as my mind processes undoubtedly are, I couldn't bring myself to care much what happened to this woman. In fact, I'm somewhat angered that perhaps I was even meant to. The idea too that she would take the rap for the mass murder of 300 people rather than reveal that she was illiterate, seems preposterous. On that premise does the story hinge, and on that premise it collapses
completely.