If you get a chance to see this film before sunday’s Oscars ceremony, do so. That’s pretty much the recommendation I can make about this deeply dark and humourous film. I had heard good things about it but confess that I hadn’t realised it had scooped a fair haul of BAFTAs recently, including one for best original screenplay. I feel vindicated now as when the credits started rolling, I turned to my wife and said “That was a superbly written film”.

The story is very easy to describe: a middle class American family drive from their home in Albuquerque to California so that their daughter can take part in a beauty pageant. So far, so nauseating. But this is by no means a heart warming tale of achievement and success in the vacuous world of highly questionable pre-teen popularity contests. To call the family in question a bit dysfunctional would be like describing Idi Amin as not a very nice man.

For a moderately low budget film, costing only $8m to make, the cast is surprisingly recognisable. Alan Arkin has a BAFTA winning turn as the foul-mouthed grandfather, Greg Kinnear and Toni Collette the parents and 10 year old Abigail Breslin, who we first saw in Signs alongside Mel Gibson and Joachim Phoenix, puts in a wonderful (oscar nominated) performance as Olive, the aspiring beauty queen daughter.

The humour in this film is dry and bleak - more slapstick than The Royal Tenenbaums but considerably more subtle and intelligent than, say, a run of the mill Steve Martin family comedy. There were moments which were so deliciously absurd that I laughed out loud. This film deserves a batch of Oscars in my humble opinion, the first of which should be for the writing which was inventive and witty. I doubt it will get the gong for Best Film but I do very much hope that young Miss Breslin gets the one for best supporting actress as she is solid and believable all the way through.