The message from the Bafta film awards handed out on Sunday may be that predicting the winners is a fool’s game. They’re unpredictable. Academy members will vote for whom they damn well please.
For weeks the buzz has been around Atonement, Joe Wright’s lovingly crafted adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel. It was nominated 14 times yet came away with only two wins although one of them was some win: best film of the year against heavyweight competitors including There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men.
Few would have predicted that the French film La Vie en Rose would have won the most gongs. It won four including best actress for Marion Cotillard — who also won the Golden Globe — beating the category’s odds-on favourite Julie Christie.
The Coen brothers’ bleak No Country for Old Men won three, including the best director award for the brothers, 10 years after they won for Fargo.
Javier Bardem’s portrayal of a psychopathic hardman in the film won him best supporting actor and Roger Deakins’s cinematography won the film’s third Bafta.
Three films which only came out last week in Britain on a ‘five-star Friday” all featured in the winning enclosure. Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic There Will Be Blood won just a single award, best actor for Daniel Day Lewis, who is hotly tipped to win the Oscar at its ceremony in two weeks’ time. His performance has seen some critics’ jaws dropping. A minority though, believe that it is a touch hammy.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly won best adapted screenplay for Ronald Harwood, while Juno was given the best original screenplay gong.
The Bourne Ultimatum, Paul Greengrass’ spy thriller, had five nominations but came away winner in only the editing and sound categories.
The United States actor and comedian Shia LaBeouf, who was seen last year in Transformers and will soon appear in the new Indiana Jones movie, won the rising star award against nominees who included Sam Riley. Riley was the star of Control, playing Joy Division’s Ian Curtis, and the film won one award for its writer Matt Greenhalgh, who was given the Carl Foreman award for special achievement by a British writer, director or producer in their first feature film.
In the best animated film category, Ratatouille walked away with the award against The Simpsons and Shrek the Third. The outstanding British contribution to cinema was given to a props master, Barry Wilkinson, who has worked on early Avengers TV programmes and the Harry Potter films.
Lord Attenborough reprised his annual eulogising by giving Bafta’s highest honour, the Academy Fellowship, to the actor Anthony Hopkins, last seen in Beowulf.
The ceremony was attended by a healthy smattering of Hollywood stars and appeared to go off without any hitches. The Baftas, voted for by more than 6 000 academy members, are sometimes billed as an indication of how the Oscars will go. Will they be this year? Who knows, is the only answer. —