The BAFTAs didn’t quite ignora Anora, the current Oscar frontrunner, but the British Academy which has hundreds of voters in common with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences decided to shake things up splitting some big prizes between their nominations leader, Conclave winning four including Best Film, Best British Film, Film Editing and Best Adapted Screenplay while The Brutalist also won four including Best Director for Brady Corbet and Best Actor for Adrien Brody, Cinematography and Music Score, but in a mixed bag of results it lost Best Original Screenplay to Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain which wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture.
Anora also surprisingly lost Original Screenplay just hours after taking its third major guild award at the WGA awards Saturday night in the category (in a column last week I warned about the threat of Eisenberg’s A Real Pain stealing its thunder and that is what happened in London). But taking a different path than the DGA PGA and WGA (often more predictive voting bodies in terms of where the Oscar winds are blowing), the Brits had other ideas handing it only a Casting statuette (a category joining Oscars but not this year) and then a bit of a shocker at the end by anointing star Mikey Madison lead actress over favorite Demi Moore. Madison had lost to her at Golden Globes and Critics Choice but now could be staging a comeback with SAG and Indie Spirits still to come pre-Oscars next weekend. Brazil’s I’m Still Here Golden Globe Drama Actress winner Fernanda Torres, not nominated at BAFTA or SAG is the wild card at the Oscars making that category a bit of crapshoot at this point. Otherwise the acting prizes at BAFTA for Brody, A Real Pain’s Kieran Culkin, and Emilia Perez‘s Zoe Saldana add to their momentum heading into SAG. No one has knocked them out anywhere.
Mikey Madison
Getty
Neither of tonight’s big winners Conclave or The Brutalist won anything at PGA, DGA, or WGA (where both were ineligible due to arcane Writers Guild rules about working under their MBA so let’s add an asterisk to this statistic), otherwise I think Peter Straughan’s Golden Globe and Critics Choice winning Conclave would have been among WGA winners for sure. Nevertheless it is unusual to nail a BAFTA Best Film without at least one major guild win. Conclave has a chance to change that trajectory at SAG but that guild, with voting still open until Friday, won’t have a direct impact on Oscar with its actual winners as Oscar voting ends Tuesday. Conclave is in the running for Outstanding Cast, SAG’s equivalent of Best Picture. So what recent film won Best Film at BAFTA without also taking even one of the four major guild awards? 2014’s Boyhood comes to mind. It was nominated and shut out at each of them, won at BAFTA, and went on to lose the Best Picture Oscar to Birdman.
Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce in The Brutalist
A24/Courtesy Everett Collection
In fact until last year’s sweep of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer at both Oscars and BAFTA, the previous nine years did not see agreement on their Best Picture winner with the exception of the disastrous 2020 Covid year when Nomadland won both in a very weird awards season. Conclave, a movie every Oscar voter I talk to seems to admire, has the disadvantage of its director Edward Berger being snubbed in the Best Director race, but with a preferential ballot that might not be a hindrance anymore. Berger’s movies, All Quiet On The Western Front and Conclave are now two for two as BAFTA’s Best Film. Impressive.
As for the much discussed Ms. Perez, the scandal and controversy over Karla Sofia Gascon’s past tweets did not in the end completely derail the film’s overall chances at BAFTA as it turned out. Winning Film Not In The English Language and Supporting Actress for Zoe Saldana (who dedicated her win to her trans nephew), it joined the winners circle in what appears to be its strongest categories at the Oscars right now as well (there is no Best Song given at BAFTA). Still with 11 nominations you might wonder if its haul could not have been bigger without the baggage. We’ll never know. Netflix scored just as big tonight with its delightful and very british Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl which ran over Wild Robot and Flow for Best Animated Feature and also winning in the Family/Childrens Film category.
Some comfort food for Anora: Only Brokeback Mountain managed to go on to lose the Best Picture Oscar after winning at PGA, DGA, and WGA, just as Anora has done in the last week, and Anora still has SAG to conquer, something even Brokeback could not do. So BAFTA good times for Conclave and The Brutalist could be short-lived if you want to go by stats, but other than some of my fellow pundits who cares about those?
My unscientific surveys reflect some of the shuffling where Academy voters are concerned. First a good number are strugging to see as much as they can before ballots are due at 5pm pt Tuesday. One sound branch member told me at my Santa Barbara Film Festival tribute evening to Adrien Brody and Guy Pearce Thursday night that he is frantically trying to watch on the digital platform “but it is like homework” he said. Others are all over the map in terms of their number one choice with some not even making it through certain titles that won’t be named here.
Three days left to vote, Academy members. Oscars two weeks from tonight. Fasten your seatbelts.
