‘Oppenheimer’ Sweeps the BAFTAs With 7 Awards Including Best Film

“Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film concerning the growth of the atomic bomb, swept the board on the EE British Academy Film Awards in London on Sunday.

The film received seven awards at Britain’s equal of the Oscars, together with finest movie, finest director for Nolan and finest main actor for Cillian Murphy for his portrayal of the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.

It beat 4 different nominees to the perfect movie prize, together with “Poor Things,” Yorgos Lanthimos’s tackle a Frankenstein story and “The Holdovers,” Alexander Payne’s comedy a couple of boarding faculty instructor caught taking care of a pupil over the vacations. It additionally beat “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour epic concerning the Osage murders of the Nineteen Twenties, and “Anatomy of a Fall,” Justine Triet’s multilingual courtroom drama a couple of lady accused of murdering her husband.

In the times main as much as the awards, generally referred to as the BAFTAs, most British film critics predicted that “Oppenheimer” would win huge. Tom Shone, writing in The Times of London, mentioned that Nolan’s “magnum opus” was an immediate traditional. “Sometimes the front-runner is the front-runner for a reason,” he added.

Still, the prizes had been Nolan’s first director wins on the BAFTAs, regardless of a number of earlier nominations for his motion pictures “Inception” and “Dunkirk.”

At the ceremony at London’s Royal Festival Hall, Nolan, who grew up in London, appeared just a little overwhelmed by all of the accolades. Accepting the perfect director prize, he known as the award “an incredible honor” then reminisced about his dad and mom dragging him to the pageant corridor, a serious classical music venue as a boy. In reality, he mentioned, his youthful brother, now additionally a TV and filmmaker, had overwhelmed him to the corridor’s stage “by about 40 years” as a result of he as soon as took half in a efficiency of “The Nutcracker.”

Accepting the perfect actor prize, Murphy additionally appeared shocked. “Holy moly!,” he mentioned, earlier than thanking Nolan, and the producer Emma Thomas, Nolan’s spouse, for permitting him to play the “colossally, knotty, complex character” of Oppenheimer. Nolan and Thomas noticed “something in me that I probably didn’t see in myself,” Murphy added.

Among the opposite awards for “Oppenheimer” had been finest supporting actor for Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, the Oppenheimer’s nemesis who insisted he would solely lead the Atomic Energy Commission if Oppenheimer had been faraway from his consulting function; finest authentic rating; finest enhancing; and finest cinematography.

Those wins come simply weeks after the film captured 5 of the principle awards at this 12 months’s Golden Globes, and will likely be seen by many as additional boosting its probabilities for subsequent month’s Oscars, particularly as a result of the BAFTA and Oscar voting our bodies overlap.

Even with “Oppenheimer” dominating the occasion, a number of different motion pictures did properly. “Poor Things” took 5 prizes together with the perfect main actress award for Emma Stone. Accepting that prize, Stone, who’s American, first thanked Neil Swain, her dialect coach, for educating her the best way to communicate in a British accent. “He did not laugh at me when he taught me how to say, ‘water,’” she mentioned, to laughs from the viewers. Its different awards had been for make up and hair, costume, particular visible results and manufacturing design.

“The Zone of Interest,” Jonathan Glazer’s artwork home film a couple of German household’s day-to-day life close to the Auschwitz focus camp in the course of the Holocaust, additionally did properly, profitable three awards, together with finest movie not within the English language — a extremely contested class during which it surpassed each “Anatomy of a Fall” and “Past Lives,” Celine Song’s romantic film about two childhood associates who hold reuniting in later life.

Among the opposite notable winners was Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who took the perfect supporting actress award for her efficiency as a faculty prepare dinner mourning the loss of life of her son in “The Holdovers.”

Randolph can also be nominated in the perfect supporting actress class at this 12 months’s Oscars, scheduled for March 10.