Oppenheimer’s the bomb at Baftas
Atom bomb epic Oppenheimer won seven prizes, including best picture, director and actor, at the 77th British Academy Film Awards on Sunday, cementing its front-runner status for the Oscars next month.
Gothic fantasia Poor Things took five prizes and Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest won three.
Barbie, the year’s highest-grossing film, came out empty-handed. It had no wins from five nominations, with director Greta Gerwig, who failed to get a directing nomination for the Oscars — in what was seen by many as a major snub — also being passed over by the Baftas.
British-born film-maker Christopher Nolan won his first best director Bafta for Oppenheimer, and Irish performer Cillian Murphy won the best actor prize for playing physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb.
Murphy said he was grateful to play such a “colossally knotty, complex character”.
Noting the film’s “nihilistic subject”, Nolan thanked the movie’s backers for “taking on something dark”.
Emma Stone won best actress for playing the wild and spirited Bella Baxter in Poor Things, a steampunkstyle visual extravaganza that won prizes for visual effects, production design, makeup, and hair and costume design.
Oppenheimer had a field-leading 13 nominations but missed out on the record of nine trophies, set in 1971 by
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
It won the best film race against Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, Anatomy of a Fall and The Holdovers. Oppenheimer also scooped trophies for editing, cinematography and musical score, and the best supporting actor prize for Robert Downey jnr.
Da’Vine Joy Randolph was named best supporting actress for playing a boarding school cook in The Holdovers and said she felt a “responsibility I don’t take lightly” to tell the stories of under-represented people like her character Mary.
The Zone of Interest, a Britishproduced film shot in Poland with a largely German cast, was named best British film and best film not in English — a first — and also took the
Bafta winners clockwise from main picture: Christopher Nolan, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Emma Stone and Cillian Murphy. prize for its sound, which has been described as the real star of the film.
Jonathan Glazer’s unsettling drama takes place in a family home just outside the walls of the Auschwitz death camp, whose horrors are heard and hinted at, rather than seen.
“It seems stark right now that we should care about innocent people being killed in Gaza or Yemen or Mariupol or Israel,” producer James Wilson said. “Thank you for recognising a film that asks us to think in those spaces.”
Ukraine war documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, produced by the Associated Press and PBS Frontline, won the prize for best documentary.
“This is not about us,” said film-maker Mstyslav Chernov, who captured the harrowing reality of life in the besieged city with an AP team. “This is about Ukraine, about the people of Mariupol.”
The Rising Star award, the only category decided by public vote, went to Mia McKenna-Bruce, star of How to Have Sex.