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From the rumoured vantage point of a luxury yacht, Spielberg and his fellow Cannes judges may have a different perspective to critics on the pick of this year's offerings – not least Nebraska

Rumour has it that the jurors at this year's Cannes film festival occasionally bypass the official screenings, preferring instead to watch the films from the luxury of Steven Spielberg's yacht, with its infinity pool and state-of-the-art cinema. Obviously, there is no way of knowing if such gossip has any bearing on reality (not really mixing in those circles and all), but I do relish the image of the millionaire judges – Spielberg, Ang Lee, Nicole Kidman et al – vaguely squinting at the screen while the champagne and cigars are passed around. It sounds like something out of La Grande Bellezza.

What they are thinking is anyone's guess. By this stage last year, the consensus had it that Michael Haneke's Amour was the runaway favourite. This year we appear to be deep in William Goldman country. Nobody knows anything.

Judged purely on the basis of critical response, the current favourites are the Coens' Inside Llewyn Davis, Ashgar Farhadi's The Past and Paolo Sorrentino's La Grande Bellezza, although Abdellatif Kechiche's Blue is the Warmest Colour – a three-hour coming-of-age lesbian love story – is exciting rave reviews and may yet crash the party.

Yet the sad fact is that jurors and journalists do not always walk in lockstep. There are whispers that Spielberg – who holds the reins as jury president – may well plump for something sweeter and slighter, such as Hirokazu Kore-eda's pleasant yet insubstantial Like Father, Like Son.

Chances are he will look fondly on Nebraska as well. Alexander Payne's monochrome road movie amounts to a catchy, maudlin ballad of the American Depression, eased along by an over-insistent score and yet anchored by a robust performance from Bruce Dern as Woody Grant, an ornery old alcoholic who thinks he's won a fortune.

En route to cash his ticket, Grant and his son fetch up in their former hometown of Hawthorne, Nebraska. And it is here that Payne sketches a portrait of small-town America that would have Norman Rockwell weeping onto his easel. Paint peels off the house fronts, home-loan hoardings hang over Main Street, and the family farmstead is standing empty. "It's just a bunch of old wood and some weeds," shrugs Woody. The film's a little soft at the centre – and perhaps a shade too indebted to About Schmidt, in which Payne directed Jack Nicholson in a similar vein – but it makes for a lovely, languid outing all the same. I can't believe it will hit the jackpot but I'm awfully glad it was given a slot.

Outside the Palais, a herd of delegates are dragging their cases towards the coach. "Terminal one!" the driver is shouting. No luxury yacht for the likes of them. They are being packed in like sardines and trundled back to dirty reality.

Figures of speech are to be applauded when used wisely, but start employing 'epicentres' and 'seismic shifts', and you're in danger

Lord Foulkes of Cumnock, the former Labour Scotland minister, said the other day of Nigel Farage: "He is like a bull in a china shop and has just come into Scottish politics with flat feet and muddied the water." (The Ukip leader, heckled by protesters in Edinburgh, had been locked in a pub by police before being carted off to safety in the back of a riot van.) Such turns of phrase appear occasionally as fillers in the New Yorker, usually culled from the pages of lesser publications, under the heading: "Block That Metaphor!" It's sound advice, on the whole. There's nothing necessarily wrong with mixed metaphors, if they are well mixed: by flooding his china shop, Foulkes almost comes up with an evocative image, though he rather spoils it with the flat-hooved bull. But they are usually the result of carelessness or overambition, and either way make for baffling reading.

Metaphors don't have to be mixed to be a problem: any figurative expression, if it's overused or used carelessly, can be confusing or off-putting. (And, yes, it's true that all words are figurative, but it's also true that some are more figurative than others.) Wolcott Gibbs, on the staff of the New Yorker from 1927 until his death in 1958, once compiled a set of 10 guidelines for editing fiction. The last was: "Try to preserve the author's style, if he is an author and has a style." The third: "Our writers are full of cliches, just as old barns are full of bats. There is obviously no rule about this, except that anything you suspect of being a cliche undoubtedly is one, and had better be removed." One implication of this is that cliches are fine if you don't notice them; there is such a thing as prose that is too laboriously original. Metaphors, new or shopworn, work when they bring things into sharper focus. If they don't do that, they are best avoided. It's especially annoying when expressions that have a precise literal sense are used in an imprecise figurative way, so that meaning is lost from both. Some examples:

Earthquakes

The epicentre of an earthquake is the point on the Earth's surface directly above the hypocentre, which is the point at which a fault first ruptures. It shouldn't be a fancy way of saying "absolute centre", which there's never any reason to say: "centre" will do just fine. Similarly, the word "shift" almost never needs to be qualified with "seismic". It also probably isn't a good idea to ask someone if the earth moved.

DNA

"DNA" isn't a more scientific way of saying "essence" or "soul" or "core of one's being". DNA is often called the "blueprint" of life; that's a good metaphor. No one would mistake the blueprint of a building for its essence. Come to think of it, no one would try to say a building had an essence. This isn't mere pedantry, there's an ideological problem with it, too. Saying that something is "in someone's DNA" is too often a way of saying there's nothing that can be done about it and pretending that that's a scientific fact.

Catalysts

A catalyst is something that speeds up a chemical reaction but is itself unchanged at the end of the reaction. Someone who sparks a revolution by setting themselves on fire shouldn't be described as a catalyst.

War

Ian Hacking, in The Social Construction of What?, made a "gentle protest" against such labels as "the culture wars" or "the science wars": "Metaphors influence the mind in many unnoticed ways. The willingness to describe fierce disagreement in terms of the metaphors of war makes the very existence of real wars seem more natural, more inevitable, more a part of the human condition. It also betrays us into an insensibility toward the very idea of war, so that we are less prone to be aware of how totally disgusting real wars really are." The "war on drugs" may have begun as a metaphor when Nixon declared it in 1971, but it soon became all too real. More trivially, the title of Martin Amis's essay collection, The War on Cliche, is self-defeating.

Food and recipes

In the words of Alan Partridge, "I promise you tonight we'll have a real half-pound cheeseburger of a show for you. And it's a cheeseburger that contains lots of meaty chat, a salad of wit and a flap of amusing cheese." At least there's no mention of an onion with layers that can be peeled back to reveal more onion.

Journeys

Metaphorical journeys are so commonplace as to be pretty much unavoidable, though that's no excuse for such bureaucratic excrescences as "direction of travel" and "going forward".

The very metaphor itself. "Very" and "itself" don't help. Bang a drum as loudly as you like, it will never sound like an oboe.

The proverbial duck

Proudly owning up to a cliche ("water off the proverbial duck's back") or trying to conceal it ("water off a mallard's back") doesn't make the cliche any less a cliche, it merely draws unwanted attention to it. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck – even if it's a mallard on steroids going forward with layers of onion woven into its very DNA at the epicentre of the war on geese – it's still a duck.