You know, that long, slow, dull deathmarch to the Oscars where every single vaguely filmy organisation on the face of the planet announces which movies it enjoyed watching most. But more than that, awards season marks the time of year when we wish we had another job. Any other job. A job involving heights and spikes and angry bears, even.

And now the good news – The Los Angeles Film Critics Association gave its best picture award to WALL-E.

We’re going to be cautious here and meekly suggest that this awards season isn’t going to be as throat-slittingly interminable as it usually is, on the basis that something quite incredible is happening – this year, movies that people have actually seen might win something.

It’s still a long shot – after all, don’t forget that Sean Penn is still starring as an inspirational yet tragic figure this year and Hollywood’s got Holocaust movies coming out of its arse – but if the Los Angeles Film Critics Association is anything to go by, this year might be the year that bone-dry dramas based on issues and tragedy and crying might be replaced by, gasp, entertainment.

Although the last two years has seen the Los Angeles Film Critics Association name the likes of Brokeback Mountain and There Will Be Blood as its best films, this year it has decided to give its top award to WALL-E, the almost dialogue-free kid’s cartoon about a funny robot. BBC News reports:

Wall-E has been named best film of the year by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association as Hollywood gears up for Thursday’s Golden Globe nominations. The Pixar film was chosen ahead of The Dark Knight by the body, which gave its best actor prize to Sean Penn for Milk.

Weird, huh? WALL-E. Not a rites of passage film about a boy who treks across the Andes. Not a film about Darfur starring a popular actor who wants an Oscar more than life itself. Not a biopic of a recently-dead musician. WALL-E, the film that people a) paid to see in the droves and b) actually enjoyed. How utterly mystifying. WALL-E isn’t even based on a book or anything.

But just because a bunch of dusty old movie critics happened to like it, it doesn’t mean that WALL-E should hang out the bunting just yet – the Los Angeles Movie Critics Association hardly ever picks the same movie for Best Picture as the Oscars.

But still, this is still undeniably good news – not just for WALL-E but for populist movies in general. Finally, after years in the wilderness, it looks like they’re being accepted alongside all the impenetrably highbrow arthouse fodder that has dominated the awards scene lately.

And you know what that means – come the Oscars, Beverly Hills Chihuahua’s going to win EVERYTHING!

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Folded:

• Online teaser for Oliver Stone’s George Bush biopic W (mock the man)
• The Bowen Identity (even piss poor Photoshop skills can make you funny)
• Hellboy 2: The Golden Army (seen it, and it’s pretty good)
• David McCallum (if you’ve played GTA IV and heard the track The Edge, you’ll know why Dre immortalised it and why McCallum is such a fusion legend. Yes, he also done some acting too)
• WALL-E (look at his little face, how could you not love Wall-E?)

Creased:

• Topman gift cards (they might look all black and trendy, but you can’t see how much you have left to spend! Bring back paper vouchers)
• Sasha: Beauty Queen at Eleven (this girl’s mum should be chopped up and fed to hungry pitbulls. The dad too for letting this spectacle happen right under his nose)
• The hard-to-penetrate world of Metal Gear Solid 4 (don’t misunderstand us, this is a great game: great graphics, sound, presentation – it’s just completely incomprehensible unless you know the Metal Gear mythology inside out)
• More fake tan woes (Jesus, girls, take it off! You smell like Digestives in this heat)
• Playing GRID online (and the barrage of insults from French people that comes with it)

Set 800 years in the future, WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) is the last robot left on earth, doggedly cleaning up the waste the humans left behind when they fled to space.

Despite the obvious message, this film manages to stop short of beating audiences round the head with the ethical nunchucks.

The latest film from Academy Award-winning director/writer Andrew Stanton, Disney-Pixar’s WALL-E is actually a love story. Going about his work day after day, WALL-E is lonely. That is until EVE (Extra-Terrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) comes along, searching for signs of life on earth. After 800 years of communing with a cockroach called Hall, WALL-E falls in love with sleek and hi-tech EVE, beginning an adventure which makes him the inadvertent saviour of humanity.

From the team that gave us Toy Story, Finding Nemo and Ratatouille, expectations were always going to be high, but WALL-E goes beyond anything we have ever seen before. There is almost no dialogue as EVE and WALL-E cannot speak. However Stanton manages to side-step the ‘E.T phone home’ moments through the quality of the animation and the pervasiveness of the film’s musical score.

Sifting through tons of human junk, WALL-E has amassed an Aladdin’s cave of treasured items, one of which is an old video of Hello Dolly. Throughout the film, WALL-E aspires to one thing – to hold hands like the characters from the film he replays over and over. The song Put On Your Sunday Clothes therefore informs not only the musical, but the thematic elements of WALL-E, providing some of the most comic and heart-warming moments of the film.

As you may have already gathered, we loved this film. Stanton and his team have created a world in which the robots are human and the humans are robots. The crisis of categorisation evidenced in WALL-E by his finding a spork (is it a spoon or is it a fork? Spoon? Fork? It can’t be both!) is just one of many examples in which this film, despite its sci-fi theme, remains remarkably real throughout.

It is Robinson Crusoe meets Transformers, with a few obese humans thrown in for good measure. Oh, and Signourney Weaver is the sexy voice of the spaceship, proving that this film has something for all the family!

[story by Amy Grier]

No jokes, at a recent press conference, which we were surprisingly invited to, he actually said: “When we were making this movie there was no one checking up on me, so I was basically a free range chicken left to do what I wanted.”

You heard it here first.

And so it’s just as well he didn’t cluck it up.Wall-E is a bona fide summer smash. It may be a little soppy for some but what would we expect from an egg-laying director with a high-stepping past.

“Yes, I was in Hello Dolly in high school. I played Barnaby,” revealed a slightly embarassed Stanton.

It’s not surprising then that the Broadway smash features heavily in the movie, with a lot of the narrative based on some of the songs.

In fact, it has been such a hit, Broadway producers are already rubbing their hands with glee over the amount of cash they could make out of a Hello, Dolly revival. So that’s something to look forward to then.

Keen to get in on the jazz-handed act, Ben Burt – creator of the ‘voice’ for Wall-E and R2D2 amongst others – was also enjoying the Broadway vibe:

“You know what helped create Wall-E’s voice? It was the voice in that opening song, that Hello Dolly vocal that appealed to me in a way that just connected. I just couldn’t forget that damn song.”

The sound design legend, who has collaborated with Hollywood heavyweights like George Lucas and Ridley Scott, worked on the film for three years, unheard of for a sound artist:

“It’s not like other films, I’ve never been asked to give a motor noise more pathos or make a switch cuter before.”

Sigourney Weaver described herself as a ‘happy hitchhiker’ given her minimal part in the film.

Just as well really, the star of Alien, Working Girl and, ahem, Heartbreakers has been nothing but a well meaning cheering section in these latest PR jaunts.

The wallpaper probably gave juicier quotes.

But we can’t hold that against her. It’s a great movie from a great production team and a doff of the cap probably wouldn’t go amiss.

[story by Tom Henry]

But no film this summer is likely to be as controversial as Wall-E, the latest Pixar movie to top the weekend box office. It's hard to think of a more uncommercial-sounding movie than a film about a silent robot compacting rubbish on a deserted planet, but that's what Wall-E is.

And Wall-E isn't just a commercial success, either. As well as being number one in the US weekend box office, the movie has also been called 'perfect' by more than one reviewer. Yeah? So what – there's a bit in The Love Guru where it sounds like Mike Myers is calling someone 'cuntface' when he's not and it's funny, so shove that up your critically adored poop-chute, Wall-E.

Does anyone else get the feeling Pixar is out to make the least-appealing summer movie ever? It had a good crack at it with Ratatouille – a film about a dirty-pawed rat crawling all over people's food – but people loved that.

And now it's having another shot with Wall-E, a love story between two non-verbal metallic objects set in a dystopian futurescape.

But, guess what, it doesn't matter – Wall-E is still lording it over the rest of the weekend box office. When will Pixar learn that it won't be able to make a genuinely unappealing movie until it adapts that Rosie O'Donnell biopic screenplay that we sent it a few years ago? Here's this week's US weekend box office top five…

1 - Wall-E (Relish Wall-E while you can, for it won't be long before someone releases the Wall-E videogame and, if the Ratatouille game is any indication, it'll be so awful that you'll end up wanting to burn down any shop that you see it in) $62,500,000

2 - Wanted (OK Angelina Jolie, you've done your popular sexy assassin movie now. As per your contract, you're now allowed to make four small worthy movies about various world problems that nobody will see before we ask you to make another one) $51,118,000

3 - Get Smart (Female movie stars take note – get yourself romantically caught up with a potentially fraudulent Italian businessman who exploits his relationship with the Vatican and your movie will lose 48.3% of its audience between its first and second weekend of release. Happens every time) $20,000,000

4 - Kung Fu Panda (Thanks to the success of Kung Fu Panda, Kung Fu Panda 2 is apparently being fast-tracked into production now. We just thought we'd warn Angelina Jolie about this now, because it's production might clash with her new movie People In Darfur Are Sad) $11,746,000

5 - The Incredible Hulk (Finally, after the disappointment of the Ang Lee Hulk movie, this is an Incredible Hulk movie that people want to see. And forget the fact that it's made about $17 million less than Ang Lee's Hulk so far. That doesn't mean anything, you hear?) $9,226,000

Read more:

Weekend Box Office – Box Office Mojo