Politically charged thriller One Battle After Another won six prizes, including best picture, at the British Academy Film Awards on Sunday, building momentum ahead of Hollywood’s Academy Awards next month.
Blues-steeped vampire epic Sinners and gothic horror story Frankenstein won three awards each, while Shakespearean family tragedy Hamnet won two including best British film.
One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s explosive film about a group of revolutionaries in chaotic conflict with the state, won awards for directing, adapted screenplay, cinematography and editing, as well as for Sean Penn’s supporting performance as an obsessed military officer.
Photo: AFP
“This is very overwhelming and wonderful,” Anderson said as he accepted the directing prize. He paid tribute to his longstanding assistant director, Adam Somner, who died of cancer in November 2024 a few weeks into production.
“We have a line from Nina Simone that we used in our film, ‘I know what freedom is: It’s no fear,’” the director said. “Let’s keep making things without fear. It’s a good idea.”
Bookies’ favorite Jessie Buckley won the best actress prize for playing grieving mother Agnes Hathaway, wife of William Shakespeare, in Hamnet. Buckley, 36, is the first Irish performer to win a best actress prize at the awards, known as BAFTAs.
Photo: AP
She dedicated her award “to the women past, present and future who taught me and continue to teach me how to do it differently.”
In a major upset, Robert Aramayo won the best actor category for his performance in I Swear, a fact-based British indie drama about a campaigner for people with Tourette syndrome.
The 33-year-old British actor looked stunned and called the victory over Ethan Hawke, Michael B. Jordan, Leonardo DiCaprio and Timothee Chalamet “absolutely mad.”
Photo: Reuters
“I absolutely can’t believe this,” he said. “Everyone in this category blows me away.”
Sinners took home trophies for director Ryan Coogler’s original screenplay, the film’s musical score and for Wunmi Mosaku’s supporting actress performance as herbalist and healer Annie.
The British-Nigerian actor said that in the role she found “a part of my hopes, my ancestral power and my connection, parts I thought I had lost or tried to dim as an immigrant trying to fit in.”
Photo: Reuters
STARS AND ROYALTY
Hollywood stars and British celebrities, from Paddington Bear to the Prince and Princess of Wales, gathered at London’s Royal Festival Hall for the awards. DiCaprio, Chalamet, Emma Stone, Cillian Murphy, Glenn Close and Ethan Hawke were among the stars walking the red carpet before a black-tie ceremony hosted by Scottish actor Alan Cumming.
Prince William and Catherine, Princess of Wales also attended, three days after William’s uncle Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested by police and held for 11 hours over allegations he sent sensitive government information to the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The scandal has rocked the royal family led by King Charles III, though William and Kate remain popular standard-bearers for the monarchy. William presented an award in his role as president of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
Among the biggest receptions from gathered fans was for Paddington, the puppet bear who stars in a musical stage adaptation of the beloved children’s classic.
OSCARS BELLWETHER
The British prizes, officially called the EE BAFTA Film Awards, often provide hints about who will win at Hollywood’s Academy Awards, held this year on March 15. Sinners has a record 16 Oscar nominations, followed by One Battle After Another with 13.
One Battle went into the BAFTAs ceremony with 14 nominations. Sinners was just behind with 13, while “Hamnet” had 11.
Ping-pong odyssey Marty Supreme also had 11 nominations but went home empty handed.
Guillermo del Toro’s reimagining of Frankenstein and Norwegian family drama Sentimental Value each got eight nominations.
Frankenstein took awards for production design, costume design and for the hair and makeup artists who spent 10 hours a day transforming Jacob Elordi into the movie’s monstrous creature.
Sentimental Value won the prize for the best film not in English.
Cumming told the audience that it had been a strong year for cinema, if not a cheerful one, with nominated films tackling themes including child death, racism and political violence:
“Watching the films this year was like taking part in a collective nervous breakdown,” he said. “It’s almost as though there are events going on in the real world that are influencing filmmakers.”
The ceremony was more glitz than gloom, though, including a performance by Ejae, Audrey Nuna and Rei Ami — the voices of animated band HUNTR/X in box office juggernaut KPop Demon Hunters — singing the movie hit Golden.
PUTIN CRITIC WINS BEST DOC
The best-documentary prize went to Mr. Nobody Against Putin, about a Russian teacher who documented the propaganda imposed on Russian schools after the invasion of Ukraine.
The film’s American director David Borenstein said that teacher Pavel Talankin had shown that “whether it’s in Russia or the streets of Minneapolis, we always face a moral choice,” referring to the protests against US immigration enforcement in Minnesota.
“We need more Mr. Nobodies,” he said.
It beat documentaries including Mstyslav Chernov’s harrowing Ukraine war portrait 2000 Meters to Andriivka, co-produced by The Associated Press and Frontline PBS.
Most BAFTA winners are chosen by 8,500 members of the UK academy of industry professionals. The Rising Star award, which is decided by public vote, went to Aramayo.
Donna Langley, the UK-born chairwoman of NBCUniversal Entertainment, was awarded the British Academy’s highest honor, the BAFTA fellowship.
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
And so, in the wake of US President Donald Trump’s trip to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), all the experts on the Strait of Hormuz suddenly became experts on US-China-Taiwan relations. The Internet has certainly expanded human knowledge. Lots of these sudden experts made noise this week about Trump’s words after the meeting with PRC dictator Xi Jin-ping (習近平). Trump is going to sell out Taiwan! Longtime Taiwan commentator J. Michael Cole summed the situation up neatly in the Guardian: “We need to keep in mind that he has a tendency to say many things — sometimes contradicting himself within
Last week US President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether he would speak on the phone to the President of Taiwan. “l’ll speak to him. I speak to everybody. We have that situation very well in hand,” Trump said. This marked the second time in a couple of weeks he had said he would talk to the President of Taiwan. In 2016 he famously took a call from then-president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), when he was president-elect. Despite warnings that the apocalypse was nigh because of a phone call, the world quickly forgot about the conversation between two democratically-elected presidents.
May 25 to May 31 Few believed that apples could be cultivated on a commercial scale in Taiwan’s high mountains. When horticulturalist Cheng Chao-hsiung (程兆熊) first proposed the idea in 1955, both American and Taiwanese colleagues dismissed it as implausible, arguing that temperate fruit could not be reliably grown on a subtropical island, especially on rugged terrain. However, it was this terrain in the Central Mountain Range where many Chinese Civil War veterans were resettled in the late 1950s. With limited job prospects and no family in Taiwan, they were placed on cooperative farms aimed toward self-sufficiency. Some say the conditions
RSS