Despite projections, female-driven films didn’t end up dominating festival discussion after all.

I have come to think of the 10 days of Sundance as a kind of controlled haemorrhage: The festival begins at maximum capacity as everyone rushes into Park City at the same time, and then as each day passes film news and film people leak out at a roughly proportional rate. My favourite part of this process comes around day six, when all the opening weekend warriors have left, there is time to catch up on the things you’ve missed, and room to turn around in the press tent without swatting someone with your badge.

By the time the awards ceremony takes place, Park City has been mostly emptied of its industry invaders and the important decisions have been made. Still, news continues to trickle out of Sundance, and although it doesn’t look like this year is going to come close to topping last year in sales, a few buyers seemed to find what they were looking for—most notably Magnolia and Fox Searchlight. The former picked up The Queen of Versailles, a reality TV-styled doc about a couple who were in the midst of building the biggest home in the United States when the economic crisis hit, Compliance, Craig Zobel’s feature based on the true case of a prank phone call to a fast food outlet that ended very, very badly, 2 Days in New York, Julie Delpy’s winsome culture clash sequel to 2 Days in Paris, V/H/S, a compilation of short horror films of the “found footage” variety, and Nobody Walks, a drama directed by Ry Russo Young and co-written by Lena Dunham.

Fox Searchlight landed the festival’s two unlikely big fish: The Surrogate and Beasts of the Southern Wild. The former won the Sundance audience award for best U.S. feature, and the latter took the Grand Jury Prize for best feature. Both are by first-time directors, and both tell stories of characters on what I guess you could call the fringe—a man confined to an iron lung by polio and a little girl who imagines her Louisiana town is perched on the edge of the world. Though films with marquee names attached like The Words (Zoe Saldana, Bradley Cooper), Arbitrage (Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon), and Lay the Favorite (Bruce Willis, Rebecca Hall) are quietly signing deals for VOD and/or theatrical distribution, it seems safe to declare Sundance 2012 The Year of the Ringer.

Ryan Murphy looks back at the AIDS epidemic, Julia Roberts plays around with Meryl Streep, and Alejando Gonzalez Inarritu plots some revenge.

Two of the most important and resonant responses to the spread of HIV and the subsequent rise of deaths in the gay community from AIDS have never made it to the movies. Randy Shilts’ damning non-fiction study of the disease’s early spread amid official apathy, And the Band Played On, was made into a HBO mini-series in 1993, while Larry Kramer’s incendiary 1985 play, The Normal Heart, has stayed on the stage. The latter was prominently revived on Broadway last year, and that appears to have secured the work a screen adaptation.

Ryan Murphy, the television impresario (Glee, American Horror Story) whose filmmaking efforts have been somewhat patchy (Running With Scissors, Eat Pray Love), will direct a script written by Kramer. For the central role of Ned, a New York City writer and gay activist whose anger grows in the absence of organised research and health warnings, Murphy has cast Mark Ruffalo (The Kids Are All Right), while there are parts for Alec Baldwin (Ned’s homophobic brother), Matt Bomer (Ned’s boyfriend) and Julie Roberts (as the wheelchair-bound doctor who’s one of the first to understand the looming crisis).

It will be the latter’s second collaboration with Murphy, and Roberts continues to run an eclectic schedule. She plays a comically camp Evil Queen in Mirror Mirror, one of the forthcoming Snow White films, is still due to co-star with Meryl Streep in the adaptation of another key American play, Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County, and will also produce and star in Second Act, a comedy about a woman who is forced to take a job after a lifetime of not working. She appears to be leaving the romantic comedies that made her the most commercially popular actress in Hollywood to the younger hopefuls hoping to succeed her.

Mock posters put a clever new spin on the hype for Academy Awards candidates.

Amid all the earnest commentary, debate and prognostications over the Academy Awards, it’s refreshing to see someone taking the Mickey out of the nominees.

The UK website TheShiznit.co.uk cheekily has poked fun at the best film contenders by redesigning the movie posters “so they're a little more honest about their content.”

[Related: See the full list of 2012 Oscar nominees]
[Oscar watch 2012: SBS Coverage]

Water. Take a look around every paddock, every time you’re in the country, and you might not even see the water. But each paddock, each field, usually has a source of water, if not for livestock, then for crops. Under the earth and along fence lines are countless kilometres of pipe, feeding into baths and troughs, some gravity fed, some using a siphon, some connected to pumps and most work on a float valve, the kind of thing that sits in your cistern above your dunny and allows the water to run and stop before overflowing.

Our new place, 70 acres of valley floor near Cygnet (the neighbours call it "the gully"), has plenty of water compared to many farms. Seven dams. At least three seem to be spring fed, and there’s also a winter creek. But allowing livestock down to the creek or dam isn’t the most efficient use of a resource, so we have to hook up clean, fresh sources of water in every paddock. A simple task, until you realise that pipes cost a bucket, the fat ones are a nightmare to unroll, and to bury one you need a tractor or a backhoe or some other machinery. Add in time, the expense of float valves; hole saws to drill through baths salvaged from the tip; the fact that water, by definition, is to be found at the bottom of the valley, but we need to get it out of the creek bed and dams and up to the cows, the sheep, the pigs. Without power. Without risk of it failing. And in a way that we can rotational graze our livestock to get the most from the grass, the land, the animals.

(Rotational grazing involves moving the herd quite regularly to new grass, a process that mimics the migration of grazing animals, and is believed to help improve soil depth and structure.)

Rafael Nadal will verse Novak Djokovic in the 2012 Australian Open final. (AAP)

Tonight’s Australian Open men’s final is a clash of the titans – and one from which I expect Rafael Nadal to emerge victorious.

Just.

Nadal will go into the final an underdog, something he’s not had to worry about for most of his career, even though he’s shared 26 Grand Slam titles with Roger Federer, probably the greatest player of all time.

But Djokovic has just enjoyed the most dominant single year of tennis in decades, which culminated in three Grand Slam wins and an extraordinary 41 straight wins until the French Open semi-finals.

The Serb is also the reigning champion, having thrashed Andy Murray on this stage 12 months ago.

Ridiculously, Channel Seven had a decibel meter on centre court to measure Sharapova%u2019s shrieks. (AP)

Already everyone’s billing the Australian Open women’s final as the "shrieker vs the screamer", as Maria Sharapova prepares to take on Victoria Azarenka.

The issue of grunting, screeching, or otherwise making a rather offensive sound during a rally isn’t a new one – remember the stick Monica Seles used to cop in the 1990s?

But it seems to have reached a new high – or low – this week, with the antics of both Sharapova and Azarenka. Jim Courier is on record as saying it’s unfair, as players rely on the sound of the ball hitting the racquet to determine how fast the ball’s coming over the net.

Several players mustered the courage to speak up about the distraction, including Agnieszka Radwanska, who lost to Azarenka in a quarter-final on Tuesday.

You may wish to sit down for this, but this year's Paris-Roubaix could be marginally less cobbly.

Organisers have warned that the race's most famous stretch, the Forest of Arenberg, is under threat after utterly unforeseeable weather left bits of the road covered in soil.

"Nature has reasserted itself, and mud is covering the ground," sighed Jean-Francois Pescheux, a representative of the Amaury Sports Organisation (ASO), as if Arenberg was a sandbank in the path of the Amazon and not a forest in France.

The ASO runs Paris-Roubaix and the Tour de France, so it may come as a surprise that the organisation is wringing its hands about the failure by French authorities to maintain a road that is used precisely once per year, rather than offering to, say, chip in for a couple of spades to initiate the clean-up.

Cadet journalist Hannah Hollis takes a look at media coverage of the Tent Embassy protest.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Mick Gooda said he was “appalled” at the level of disrespect and aggression shown towards the two leaders: “Aggressive, divisive and frightening”.

He also said the actions yesterday went “too far” and questioned the timing of the protests “when we’re so close to moving towards cementing respect for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in our Constitution”.

Similarly, former ALP President Warren Mundine said the protesters overreacted to Tony Abbott’s comments: “The words were pretty timid”.

(Image: Getty)

Still on a high from the success of the national road titles and phenomenal Tour Down Under Mike Tomalaris wonders where the buzz is for the Cycling Australia Track National Championships.

Cycling Australia's track national championships begin this week.

Trust me they do!

But sadly if you live, or have been staying anywhere in the vicinity of Adelaide (as I have since the end of the Santos Tour Down Under), you'd be excused for thinking the titles are being held in another land far, far away.

Benedict Cumberbatch shows class, Bong Joon-ho trains up, and Tommy Lee Jones goes to war.

“Being a posh actor in England, you can’t escape class-typing, from whatever side you look at it. I realised quite early on that, although I wasn’t trying to make a career speciality of it, I was playing slightly asexual, sociopathic intellectuals,” the actor Benedict Cumberbatch recently remarked to the Radio Times. “I was brought up in a world of privilege. It can ostracise you from normal codes of conduct in society.” If that’s the case, the 35-year-old isn’t faring that badly. Cumberbatch is currently on cinema screens in Steven Spielberg’s War Horse and Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, providing a nuanced, vulnerable foil to Gary Oldman in the latter, and he stars as a modern day Sherlock Holmes on the successful BBC television series Sherlock.

And his forthcoming roles suggest that his aristocratic demeanour is being put to unexpected use by some filmmakers. In Peter Jackson’s return to Middle Earth, The Hobbit: There and Back Again, Cumberbatch will not only provide the voice of Smaug the dragon, but with motion capture technology he’ll also lay the foundations of the nefarious beast’s performance. He’s also been cast in another blockbuster, 2013’s 3D Star Trek reboot sequel. The role returning director JJ Abrams has earmarked Cumberbatch for isn’t confirmed, although there are obsessives who swear that the timelines match perfectly for Cumberbatch to play a younger version of Star Trek’s most revered villain, Ricardo Montalban’s Khan from 1982’s The Wrath of Khan.

Should Cumberbatch worry? Unless he has his heart set on getting a call from Mike Leigh, probably not. As he knows, for every role the British class divide denies to him, there’s an actor who can’t get a look in for the parts Cumberbatch does get. You don’t hear Eddie Marsan or Ray Winstone complaining, and the only real risk for Cumberbatch is in allowing his background to become a kind of cinematic shorthand that pigeonholes him. That’s called doing a Hugh Grant.