I feel I must go some way to putting the record straight.

Shropshire’s big local cinemas are not to blame for the sparsity of Oscar-winning fare on the county’s big screen – it’s the bafflingly inconsistent distributors we should be pointing our fingers at.

Readers rightly point out that the first priority of multiplexes is to make money, and that it’s the super hero blockbusters and kiddie-friendly adventures which are more likely to put bums on seats, sell bucketloads of popcorn, and generate the cash which keeps the British film industry in such good health.

But when cinemas have multiple screens, with peak viewing times and much quieter periods, you’re not telling me they couldn’t also find a tiny corner in an off-peak period to dedicate to a rather wider range of offerings.

Odeon seems to be the worst culprit here in Shropshire. Do the powers-that-be at headquarters view Telford as some sort of backward community which only wants to watch puerile comedies or slasher movie remakes? Sometimes, it seems that way. Perhaps they’re right. Perhaps they have researched the market and reached that conclusion, and box office takings prove the point.

But if that is the case, then I have a plea; stop showing trailers for “coming soon” movies which end up not being shown.

Again, it’s not the fault of the local cinema staff. They are told which trailers they have to show, and only find out a few days before a film’s official release if the distributors haven’t allocated them a copy of the movie to show. They’re as frustrated as the rest of us.

Down the road in Shrewsbury, Cineworld does seem to get a trickle of films which don’t come to Telford. It did show The Reader a couple of weeks after its official release, and gave a brief run to Penelope Cruz’s Oscar-winning turn in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

And it still managed to show all the big crowd pleasers too – even though it has fewer screens than its neighbour a few miles down the M54.

So, even though the older cinema audiences don’t tend to splash out as much cash at the concession stall as the teenagers, or visit the cinema quite as frequently, the “something for everyone” model can work.

It would be interesting to see how many tickets have been sold in Shropshire for The Pink Panther 2 in recent weeks – I suspect not many. You just know, however, that if the Pink Panther 3 gets made in a couple of years’ time, it will still get a nationwide release and be shown at every multi-screen cinema. Such is the power of the big studios.

Word of mouth can put bums on seats. You only have to look at Slumdog Millionaire, which nearly went straight to DVD before being given a test screening in America. Audiences lapped up the chance to see something different, and distributors were bold enough to give it a “proper” worldwide release even though it had no big-name stars to draw in fans.

The rest, as they say, is history.

By Carl Jones