Catherine Shoard

Catherine Shoard leads the Guardian’s film coverage, focusing on the way cinema, stardom and genre storytelling intersect with awards, industry power and audience experience. Her work sits in entertainment with a strong emphasis on film, blending commissioning responsibilities with reported features, criticism and opinion pieces on screen culture. She distinguishes herself from a generic entertainment reporter by treating film as both a creative art and a contested public arena, tracking how performances, campaigns and readership shape which stories break through.

Leading the Guardian’s film coverage

Shoard is responsible for commissioning and editing a wide range of film content for the Guardian, including news stories, reviews, interviews, features and comment. She also writes a regular column on cinema, contributing opinion pieces that sit alongside the reporting she oversees.

Her role carries both editorial and strategic weight: she sets the overall direction of the film desk while working closely with writers on individual pieces, ensuring that the paper’s coverage reflects both major releases and structural shifts in the industry. She has held senior responsibility for film at the Guardian for well over a decade, bringing experience from previous work as a film critic and arts journalist at other national titles into her current commissioning and editing decisions.

Her film content is syndicated to other outlets, extending the reach of Guardian film journalism to international audiences.

Awards, industry politics and star performances

Awards coverage is a defining strand of Shoard’s work, both in current writing and in her archive. Her recent piece on Andrew Scott and the best actor Oscar examines whether he could become the first out gay man to win that category, using his performance and the awards race to explore questions of recognition, identity and acting craft.

She handles awards as more than red-carpet spectacle, situating individual performances within long-running patterns of who gets rewarded and why. Earlier coverage of the Oscars and Baftas traced campaigns, outcomes and critical reactions across cycles, from the dominance of films such as The King’s Speech to the role of festivals like Sundance in shaping awards contenders.

She has written reactions to Oscar nominations, critics’ views of major ceremonies, and detailed pieces on directors and actors whose fortunes rise and fall with each season. Alongside these industry-focused stories, Shoard also covers high-profile actors such as Tom Holland and Zendaya, treating their personal milestones and public personas as part of the wider story of contemporary screen fame.

Her awards writing is often paired with interviews and Q&A formats, including reader sessions on the Oscars that turn live questions into structured analysis of the year’s field.

Reviews, genre coverage and fantasy worlds

Shoard’s archive shows sustained work as a critic, with reviews ranging from smaller titles such as Tantric Tourists and Honeymooner to broader overviews of directors and trends. She has written film blog pieces and “your next box set” recommendations, covering comedy series like Father Ted and treating home viewing as an extension of cinema culture rather than a separate beat. Across this work, she blends plot description with assessment of tone, performance and thematic ambition, giving readers enough detail to understand her judgment without losing sight of how the film or series fits into a wider pattern in screen storytelling.

Her interest in genre extends beyond film into books and cross-media narratives: she has contributed to coverage of fantasy and science fiction, including explanations of why children’s books and films can outstrip adult offerings and why fantasy has become a key way of making sense of a disenchanted world.

Roundups of recent science fiction, fantasy and horror highlight her capacity to move between individual reviews and survey pieces, mapping a fast-moving field while still pointing to particular works that deserve attention. This mix of detailed reviews and genre overviews gives her a distinctive vantage point across both mainstream cinema and more niche or speculative storytelling.

Reader-focused and open arts journalism

Shoard has articulated a clear interest in open arts journalism, stressing the importance of building relationships between readers and editors and of drawing on specialist knowledge beyond traditional media circles. That perspective informs formats such as her Oscars reader Q&A, where she turns audience questions into a structured discussion of categories, performances and campaigning without sacrificing critical distance. Her weekly film column and comment pieces use accessible language while taking firm positions, inviting engagement rather than broadcasting from an aloof vantage point. She consistently treats film culture as something shared between creators, critics and viewers, which shapes how she reports on controversies, celebrates standout performances, and frames the significance of new releases. This reader-focused approach, combined with her senior role in setting coverage, makes her a central voice in how the Guardian explains and interrogates the contemporary film and fantasy landscape.