Papal thriller Conclave and immigrant epic The Brutalist on Sunday tied for top honors at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards with each film picking up four coveted gongs.
Conclave, directed by German-born Edward Berger, won the BAFTA for the best film with its tale of the intrigue and horse-trading behind the scenes during the election of a new pope.
Accepting the award, Berger recalled the journey to make the film took seven years, paying tribute to British screenplay writer Peter Straughan’s “wonderful script” and lead actor Ralph Fiennes.
Photo: AFP
US filmmaker Brady Corbet took the BAFTA for best director for The Brutalist, while leading man Adrien Brody scooped up the best actor gong for his portrayal of a Hungarian Holocaust survivor and architect who emigrates to the US.
Brody told a winners’ press conference that the film was “an opportunity for me to honor my own ancestral struggles.”
In “a film that speaks to tremendous cruelty and despicable behavior in our past ... we see elements existing today that can guide us and remind us of that,” he added.
Photo: AFP
Veteran British actor Fiennes, who played a cardinal in Conclave, once again saw his hopes of winning a BAFTA gong dashed, losing out to Brody in the race for the honor.
Scandal-hit Emilia Perez, a surreal musical about a Mexican druglord who transitions to a woman, had been heavily favored at the beginning of the year, but it ended the evening with just two BAFTAs, including one for Zoe Saldana for best supporting actress.
Until last month, French director Jacques Audiard’s movie had been expected to be a front-runner having won 11 nominations.
Photo: Reuters
However, old racist and Islamophobic tweets by lead actor Karla Sofia Gascon surfaced at the end of last month, shaking up the race just before the London ceremony and the Oscars on March 2.
A surprise of the night was the BAFTA for best actress, which went to 25-year-old Mikey Madison for her portrayal of a sex worker in the black comedy Anora, about an erotic dancer’s whirlwind romance gone wrong.
Madison, who beat out front-runner Demi Moore, told reporters she wanted to dedicate the award to “the sex worker community, I see you, you deserve respect and human dignity.”
Although they can often set the tone for the Oscars, the BAFTAs — the biggest night of the year for the British film industry — regularly diverge from the films favored by the Academy Awards in Los Angeles.
Emilia Perez director Audiard, in accepting the BAFTA for best film not in the English language, thanked all his stars, including “dear” Gascon who did not attend the ceremony amid the scandal surrounding her past tweets.
Moore, Timothee Chalamet and Ariana Grande were also at the glitzy evening hosted by Doctor Who and Good Omens star David Tennant, but all left empty-handed.
Best supporting actor went to Succession star Kieran Culkin for his role in A Real Pain about Jewish American cousins who tour Poland in honor of their grandmother. The film also garnered the best original screenplay for Jesse Eisenberg.
Saldana, who won a Golden Globe last month for her role as the sassy lawyer in Emilia Perez, said she was dedicating her BAFTA award to her trans nephew.
“They are the reason I signed to do the film in the first place,” she said, adding that she would “always stand” with the LGBTQ community, which has come under attack under the new presidency of Donald Trump.
Conclave also picked up awards for outstanding British film, editing and best adapted screenplay, while The Brutalist took awards for cinematography and original score.
Wicked picked up two BAFTAs for costume and production design, while Rich Peppiatt, who wrote Kneecap, a docu-drama about an audacious trio of Northern Irish rappers, won for an outstanding debut by a British writer.
Dune: Part Two won BAFTAs for special visual effects and best sound.
To huge cheers from the audience, Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl picked up two BAFTAs for best animated feature and best Children’s and Family Film.
France’s Coralie Fargeat was the only woman nominated in the directing category, for The Substance, which in the end picked up just one BAFTA for hair and make-up.
Kehinde Sanni spends his days smoothing out dents and repainting scratched bumpers in a modest autobody shop in Lagos. He has never left Nigeria, yet he speaks glowingly of Burkina Faso military leader Ibrahim Traore. “Nigeria needs someone like Ibrahim Traore of Burkina Faso. He is doing well for his country,” Sanni said. His admiration is shaped by a steady stream of viral videos, memes and social media posts — many misleading or outright false — portraying Traore as a fearless reformer who defied Western powers and reclaimed his country’s dignity. The Burkinabe strongman swept into power following a coup in September 2022
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
‘FRAGMENTING’: British politics have for a long time been dominated by the Labor Party and the Tories, but polls suggest that Reform now poses a significant challenge Hard-right upstarts Reform UK snatched a parliamentary seat from British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labor Party yesterday in local elections that dealt a blow to the UK’s two establishment parties. Reform, led by anti-immigrant firebrand Nigel Farage, won the by-election in Runcorn and Helsby in northwest England by just six votes, as it picked up gains in other localities, including one mayoralty. The group’s strong showing continues momentum it built up at last year’s general election and appears to confirm a trend that the UK is entering an era of multi-party politics. “For the movement, for the party it’s a very, very big
The Philippines yesterday slammed an “irresponsible” Chinese state media report claiming a disputed reef in the South China Sea was under Beijing’s control, saying the “status quo” was unchanged. Tiexian Reef (鐵線礁), also known as Sandy Cay Reef, lies near Thitu Island, or Pagasa, where the Philippines stations troops and maintains a coast guard monitoring base. Chinese state broadcaster CCTV on Saturday said that the China Coast Guard had “implemented maritime control” over Tiexian Reef in the middle of this month. The Philippines and China have been engaged in months of confrontations over the South China Sea, which Beijing claims nearly in its
RSS