I have been enjoying Gary Oldman’s very clever, entertaining and now award-winning impersonation of Winston Churchill in the movie Darkest Hour, which opens this Friday. It’s a cut above the others. But I am a total sucker for this kind of thing anyway. It only takes a character actor to get dressed up in the Homburg and the cigar and the jowls and start doing the voish, and I’m hooked. But isn’t the second world war Winston over-mythologised? (A Churchill film titled Darkest Hour should really be about Gallipoli.) Why can’t someone make a film about some other bits of his life?

Like the time in 1932, when Churchill agreed to have tea with Hitler at the Regina hotel in Munich. He was there to inspect the Blenheim battlefields and a dodgy German-American art publisher named Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl – a friend of Hitler’s – offered to broker a meeting. Churchill agreed. But then he told Hanfstaengl how much he disliked Hitler’s antisemitism. Perhaps this sentiment was passed on. Churchill was there at the appointed hour, but Hitler failed to show. So another date was fixed the next day and Hitler stood him up again.

That was that. Churchill went home and this meeting never happened. What was going through their respective minds? I suggest an 80-minute film with Lars Eidinger as Hitler, Peter Simonischek as Hanfstaengl and as Churchill, it has to be Christian Bale. After all, Bale just put on weight to play Dick Cheney. So this won’t be a stretch.

And the award for best loser goes to …

Hugh Jackman arrives at Sunday’s Golden Globes. Photograph: Christopher Polk/NBC/(Credit too long, see caption)

Now that awards season is fully upon us, the curious performance of Hugh Jackman at the Golden Globes reminds us that screen stars must always practise their “losing face”.

As James Franco beat him to best actor in the comedy/musical category, Jackman looked frozen in an attitude of politely incredulous dismay, like a streaming video that had suddenly gone into buffering mode. Or perhaps like a sleepwalker who was being coaxed back to bed by a desperately worried spouse.

Civilians outside the business we call show sometimes have little appreciation of what a terrible trial an awards ceremony is. Four out of five people in each category will fail to win, and so there is a terrible silent majority of pain: a submerged iceberg of gloomy disappointment. And when you don’t win, you have to give the performance of your life: a sudden vigorous nodding, applause – as if no other result was reasonably possible – and perhaps leaning to whisper something apparently amusing in your neighbour’s ear to cover your mortification.

And a long non-winning evening is ahead of you. Perhaps Jackman’s emotional wifi breakdown is the only way to get through it.

That was low, Logan

‘The Logan Paul case may be a corrective to the global market in online stardom.’ Photograph: Wilki/SWpix.com/REX/Shutterstock

If my 13-year-old were not a massive fan of his, I would have never heard of Logan Paul, a 22-year-old YouTube megastar with millions of young followers. Paul recently got into a world of trouble for posting a jokey video of himself next to a dead body in Japan’s “suicide forest”: Aokigahara, the eerily beautiful woodland wilderness at the foot of Mount Fuji – a destination point for the desperate.

Perhaps Paul was inspired by an awful Hollywood film on the subject: Gus Van Sant’s The Sea of Trees, a fatuous, mawkish piece of nonsense set in this forest starring Matthew McConaughey, which did its grisly bit for the Aokigahara tourist trade. There’s also a crass and silly horror film called The Forest, starring Natalie Dormer, who goes to Japan to find her twin sister, missing in Aokigahara. That, too, might have inspired Paul, and many others who were moved to visit, in the same voyeuristic spirit, like people fixing padlocks to the Pont des Arts in Paris.

But Paul was more probably driven by something else, more pathological – like our own Toby Young, he was rather addicted to the thrill of status-boosting online notoriety, a habit that needs an escalating fix. And of course, when it all goes horribly wrong, he is genuinely bewildered and upset, perhaps feeling that the outrageous public image is not the “real” him. The Logan Paul case may be a corrective to the global market in online stardom. Meanwhile, I slightly prefer my son’s other favourite YouTube star: Sam O’Nella, who posts weird history lessons with stick-men cartoons.

Lenin leads the resolution



Lenin: a cure for social media addiction? Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images

It started as a facetious joke. But in my delusional way, I’m starting to think there could be something in it. Asked by someone on Twitter last week what my new year’s resolution was, I didn’t give my traditional response (“to muddle along in the same half-arsed, mono-buttocked manner as heretofore”), but something else. I said that I would only check social media after reading 40 pages of the book I was on. And I have started doing it, motoring through Victor Sebestyen’s excellent new biography of Lenin. I sort of think I should be touring around schools, or indeed universities, evangelising for my 40-page-and-tweet approach. This is educational gold. This time next year I will get the CBE for services to literacy. In 2019 it’s going to be learning to ice-skate.

• Peter Bradshaw is a Guardian columnist