Oppenheimer wins best film, director and actor at BAFTA awards

Atom bomb epic Oppenheimer won seven prizes — including best picture, director and actor — at the 77th British Academy Film Awards on Sunday. Gothic fantasia Poor Things took five prizes.

Christopher Nolan was named best director, and Cillian Murphy won the best actor prize for playing J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb.

Emma Stone was named best actress for Poor Things, which also won several craft and design prizes at Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars.

Oppenheimer had 13 nominations but missed out on the record of nine trophies, set half a century ago by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

It won the best film race against Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, Anatomy of a Fall and The Holdovers.

Oppenheimer also won trophies for editing, cinematography and musical score, as well as the best supporting actor prize for Robert Downey Jr.

Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who was named best supporting actress for playing a boarding school cook in The Holdovers, said she felt a “responsibility I don’t take lightly” to tell the stories of underrepresented people like her character, Mary.

Oppenheimer faced stiff competition in what was widely considered a vintage year for cinema and an awards season energized by the end of actors’ and writers’ strikes that shut down Hollywood for months.

Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest — a British-produced film shot in Poland with a largely German cast — was named both best British film and best film not in English, a first.

Jonathan Glazer’s unsettling drama takes place in a family home just outside the walls of Auschwitz.

“Walls aren’t new from before or since the Holocaust, and it seems stark right now that we should care about innocent people being killed in Gaza or Yemen or Mariupol or Israel,” producer James Wilson said. “Thank you for recognizing a film that asks us to think in those spaces.”

Historical epic Killers of the Flower Moon had nine nominations for the awards, officially called the EE BAFTA Film Awards, but went home empty-handed.

The ceremony, hosted by Doctor Who star David Tennant — who entered wearing a kilt and sequined top while carrying a dog named Bark Ruffalo — is a glitzy, British-accented appetizer for Hollywood’s Academy Awards, closely watched for hints about who might win at the Oscars on March 10.

The prize for original screenplay went to French courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall. The film about a woman on trial over the death of her husband was written by director Justine Triet and her partner, Arthur Harari.

“It’s a fiction, and we are reasonably fine,” Triet joked.

Cord Jefferson won the adapted screenplay prize for the satirical American Fiction, about the struggles of a Black American novelist.

Jefferson said he hoped the success of the movie “maybe changes the minds of the people who are in charge of greenlighting films and TV shows, allows them to be less risk-averse.”

Ukraine war documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, produced by The Associated Press and PBS Frontline, won the prize for best documentary.

“This is not about us,” said filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov, who captured the harrowing reality of life in the besieged city with an AP team. “This is about Ukraine, about the people of Mariupol.”

Chernov said the story of the city and its fall into Russian occupation “is a symbol of struggle and a symbol of faith. Thank you for empowering our voice, and let’s just keep fighting.”

Other leading award contenders included The Holdovers and the Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro — each with seven nominations — and the grief-flecked love story All of Us Strangers with six. Barbed class-war dramedy Saltburn had five nominations but won nothing.

Barbie, one half of 2023’s “Barbenheimer” box office juggernaut and the year’s top-grossing film, also went home empty-handed from five nominations.

Barbie director Greta Gerwig failed to get a directing nomination for either the BAFTAs or the Oscars, in what was seen by many as a major snub.

Britain’s film academy introduced changes to increase the awards’ diversity in 2020, when no women were nominated as best director for the seventh year running and all 20 nominees in the lead and supporting performer categories were white. However, Triet was the only woman among this year’s six best-director nominees.

Before the ceremony, nominees including Bradley Cooper, Carey Mulligan, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Rosamund Pike, Ryan Gosling and Ayo Edebiri all walked the red carpet at London’s Royal Festival Hall, along with presenters Andrew Scott, Cate Blanchett and David Beckham.

Guest of honour was Prince William in his role as president of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. He arrived without his wife, Kate, who is recovering from abdominal surgery last month.

The ceremony included musical performances by Ted Lasso star Hannah Waddingham singing Time After Time, and Sophie Ellis-Bextor singing her 2001 hit Murder on the Dancefloor, which shot back up the charts after featuring in Saltburn.

Actress Samantha Morton received the academy’s highest honour, the BAFTA Fellowship, and film curator June Givanni, founder of the June Givanni PanAfrican Cinema Archive, was honoured for outstanding British contribution to cinema.