In the first of our series of best picture Oscar hustings, here’s the case for Alfonso Cuarón’s novelistic jewel about race, class and culture in Mexico City

The best picture winner can only be Alfonso Cuarón’s glorious and very personal movie Roma, co-produced with Nicolás Celis and Gabriela Rodriguez. This jewel is inspired by his own upbringing in early 1970s Mexico City, and his family’s complex relationship with their beloved live-in maid. The film’s engagement with race, culture and class together with its staggeringly choreographed setpieces and sublimely inspired incidental detail all come together with Yalitza Aparicio’s wonderful lead performance to weave a spell.

Part of it is Cuarón’s miraculously unforced narrative flow. So many movies look like they have come out of screenplay-seminar thinking: three acts, show-don’t-tell, character arc, obstacles surmounted, life-lessons learned. By contrast, Roma just spills out unhurriedly on to the screen, moving this way and that, like the water being patiently sploshed by the maid Cleo on to the tiled driveway under the film’s opening credits. It has an inspired fluency, uncoerced, unmanaged, full of digressive ease.

In its way, this is a very novelistic film, with the accretion of detail you might expect from a Bildungsroman. The experiences of Aparicio’s maidservant character Cleo do not take her on anything as explicit as a personal “journey”, but something more mysterious and internalised. We see what Cleo sees, we wonder what and how she feels, we build up our investment of sympathy with her, and it all leads to a heartrending payoff. I have still never seen the climactic scene clearly – having been semi-blinded by tears each time.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Yalitza Aparicio as Cleo and Marco Graf as Pepe in Roma. Photograph: Carlos Somonte

Cleo is a young woman of Mesoamerican heritage working as a live-in maid for a beleaguered upper-middle-class family in Mexico City. Cleo’s personal life is beginning to disintegrate alongside that of her employer, Sofía (Marina De Tavira), mother to four lively kids — though it’s Cleo who has to do the childcare heavy lifting. Cuarón shows, through a hundred little touches, that though their handsomely appointed household is superficially comfortable, the family is, in Tolstoy’s words, unhappy in its own way. The father, Antonio (Fernando Grediaga), is increasingly late home, parks his car with fanatical precision in the driveway in a way that hints at dysfunction and repressed anxiety. Soon he is away on what Sofia tells the children is a business trip but tearfully asks them to write letters to their papa begging him to come home. Meanwhile, Cleo forms a relationship with a dodgy martial-arts enthusiast, Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) who is less than supportive when she explains she has missed her period.

Quick guide Oscars 2019 Show Hide When are the Oscars? The 91st Academy awards take place on 24 February at the Dolby theatre in Los Angeles. It is broadcast live on ABC in the US, on Sky in the UK, and on Channel Nine in Australia. The red carpet portion of the show is broadcast live by the E! network. Who decides on the Oscars? The Oscars are voted for by members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (aka Ampas), which currently numbers just under 8,000 voting members, divided into 17 separate branches, including actors, directors, costume designers, etc. (To join, names have to be proposed and approved by individual branches.) The Academy has received considerable criticism in recent years for the perceived white/male/elderly bias of its voters – and a drive to create a more diverse membership was instituted after the #OscarsSoWhite campaign in 2016.

How many Oscars are there and how does a film get nominated? There are 24 categories – ranging from best picture to best sound mixing – presented on Oscar night. The Academy also gives out a bunch of Scientific and Technical awards: this year, for example, it will honour the people behind Adobe Photoshop and the Medusa Performance Capture System. Also there are the honorary Oscars: this year they are going to actor Cicely Tyson, producers Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall, Steven Spielberg's PR flack Marvin Levy and composer Lalo Schifrin (of Mission: Impossible renown). Each of the main awards has its own rules and regulations for slimming down all the eligible entries – first to a longlist, then a shortlist, then the final nomination list. In most categories, to be eligible a film must have been released for seven days in Los Angeles before 31 December, and a specialist committee makes the selection for the nomination – which is then voted on by the full membership. For the best foreign language film award, each country can submit one film (89 were put forward this year), before a committee boils them down to a final five. What do Oscar winners win? The Oscar statuette isn't solid gold: it's gold-plated bronze on a black metal base. It is 34 cm tall and weighs 3.8 kg. While the Academy doesn't own it once it is handed over, its acceptance is conditional that recipients won't sell them unless they have offered them back to the Academy for $1. Photograph: Rex Features

There are some amazing and almost dreamlike scenes in the film, left-field adventures which never look extraneous, but like the things that can happen in real, rather than surreal life: a family trip to friends in the country featuring a hair-raising shooting trip, a New Year’s party which culminates in a forest fire and one guest singing an earnest Scandinavian hymn. Fermín demonstrates his martial arts moves to Cleo in a postcoital display of self-love. Cleo later tracks him down to a weird outdoor paramilitary motivational meeting outside town. Cuarón’s finds these moments with serendipitous inspiration, and his Mexico City streetscapes are sensational, thrillingly alive, worthy of Scorsese, especially in the evocation of the Corpus Christi massacre, when around 120 people were killed by the military during a student demonstration, and which here has a sensational personal significance. Cuarón’s own superb monochrome cinematography reminded me of Michael Chapman’s work on Raging Bull.

Roma review – an epic of tearjerking magnificence Read more

It is all heading to Cleo’s own terrifying moment of truth, to the revelation about her love for the four children under her care: what she has done for them, what she has sacrificed for them, and what life has given and taken from her. There is a quiet grandeur in these scenes. With quiet dignity, she is the moral equal of everyone she meets: the children she cares for, the woman who employs her, the doctor who treats her. That is her victory. What a wonderful movie it is.