Treading new ground
Roma wins BAFTA for Best Film, while The Favourite receives seven awards.
THE Favourite and Roma were the big winners at the 72nd British Academy Film Awards in a night that held few surprises until the final award.
Entering the night with 12 nominations The Favourite took home seven awards, including Best Actress for Olivia Colman and Outstanding British Film, but it was beaten to Best Film by Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma. The film’s Best Film win marks a triumph for Netflix.
Cuaron won a record four personal BAFTAs for a single film from a record six personal nominations, including Best Director and Best Cinematography. Roma also won the BAFTA for film not in the English language.
Cuaron’s four wins bring his total BAFTA wins to seven having previously won Best Director and Best British Film for Gravity and Film Not In The English Language for producing Guillermo Del Toro’s 2006 movie Pan’s Labyrinth.
The ceremony, which took place at the Royal Albert Hall, was hosted for the second consecutive year by Joanna Lumley who mocked the Oscars’ with her opening joke. “Thank goodness BAFTA actually has a host,” said Lumley. “But I suspect that may have something do to with the fact I’m not on Twitter.”
Congratulating Bradley Cooper on his record-equalling five-nominations in different disciplines for A Star Is Born Lumley said it “probably means he needs to learn how to delegate.”
Cooper scored one win as A Star Is Born took home Best Original Music. “I got to fulfil a dream I never thought would happen,” said Cooper of the chance to compose music, “and I got to do it with some of the best musicians in the world. The music was the heartbeat of the film.”
The first award of the night went to The Favourite as it picked up Outstanding British Film. It then quickly scored its second win in the production design category.
Olivia Colman won Best Actress for her role as Queen Anne in the film. Colman drew some of the biggest laughs and applause of the night from the audience for her speech. She started by thanking “All the producers, obvs. We’re having an amazing night aren’t we?...”
The actress then went on to thank her co-stars Weisz and Stone, calling them “the coolest honour guard anyone could have.”
Colman said they were all leads and it was “weird” only one of them could be nominated for lead. “This is for all three of us,” said Colman. “It’s got my name on it but we can scratch in some other names.”
Weisz won Best Supporting Actress for The Favourite beating out co-star Stone, who was also nominated. It is Weisz’s first BAFTA having been nominated once before for The Constant Gardener ,for which she won an Oscar. Her win meant Vice actress Amy Adams went home empty-handed for a seventh time.
First-time nominee Rami Malek won the Best Actor award. The actor thanked Freddie Mercury, who he called “the greatest outsider of them” for being “unwavering, unflinching and uncompromising in every way.” Bohemian Rhapsody also won for Best Sound.
Mahershala Ali won Best Supporting Actor for Peter Farrelly’s Green Book. “The work itself has always been the reward for me so to get this sort of thing is always a bit surreal,” said Ali. It is Ali’s first BAFTA having been nominated in the same category two years ago for Moonlight, for which he won an Oscar.
Picking up the Original Screenplay award for The Favourite, writer Deborah Davis, who wrote the first draft of the screenplay 20 years ago, thanked BAFTA for “celebrating our female-dominated movie about women in power.”
British-Guyanese actress Letitia Wright won the EE Rising Star Award, the only award voted for by the public. “I want to thank everybody who gave me a chance,” said Wright. Saying she had previously considered giving up acting but that her faith had helped her through, she encouraged “anybody that is going through a tough time” to know that “God made you and loves you. Let your light shine.”
Last year’s rising star award went to Wright’s Black Panther co-star Daniel Kaluuya. Black Panther picked up this year’s BAFTA for Special Visual Effects.
Spike Lee won his first BAFTA with a win for BlacKkKlansman in the adapted screenplay category. Lee thanked the film’s real-life subject Ron Stallworth for infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse took home the BAFTA for Best Animated Film. “Animation is not a genre, it is a medium, and that medium is film,” said Phil Lord, who previously won in the same category for The Lego Movie.
The night’s biggest snub was to First Man, which entered the night with seven nominations, equal to Bohemian Rhapsody, Roma and A Star Is Born, but went home empty-handed.
Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War was unable to convert any of its four nominations into wins; while Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Mary Queen Of Scots, Mary Poppins Returns ,and Stan & Ollie also missed out on any awards despite three nominations each.