Sam’s men prepare for award raid

GEORGE MACKAY and Dean-Charles Chapman, lance-corporals Schofield and Blake, who risk everything to go on a dangerous mission in the Sam Mendes film 1917, will join screen comrades Andrew Scott and Mark Strong at Sunday night’s Baftas.

The reunion comes as 1917, which Mendes wrote with Krysty WilsonCairns, has taken more than £28 million at the UK box office — and more than $100 million in the U.S.

It’s the front-runner at the Baftas and the following weekend’s Academy Awards. But Joker, Parasite, Once Upon A Time . . . In Hollywood and The Irishman are moving heaven and earth to overtake it in the Oscars race.

The Irishman is screening tomorrow in London for Oscars voters . . . with its headline stars Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in attendance.

But my hunch is it’s likely to be 1917’s year. I agree with something MacKay said when we chatted recently.

He explained: ‘There’s something in the reserve of the period. I understood that as brittleness. But here I saw it as something bigger — an English quality.

‘A quality about the lengths that humans can go to, and the ways you can surpass yourselves in the service of something bigger.’

There are parties all over the Bafta weekend, starting with the Hollywood Academy throwing a cocktail bash for nominees tonight.

Bafta is holding a splashy party at Kensington Palace tomorrow for nominees, while Charles Finch teams up with Chanel for his annual star-studded preBafta dinner in Mayfair. And there are all manner of private soirees.

On Sunday there are parties at Grosvenor House, Soho House — and I imagine everyone will pitch up at the late-night Netflix party in Marylebone.