This turned out to be a very British night for the Baftas, a smidgen more British than usual in fact. It started out with the Hollywood A-listers in the audience being presented with hilarious British snacks, of whose existence they had no more idea than they had of life forms on the moons of Saturn. Emma Stone got some Hula Hoops, Timothée Chalamet had a bag of Scampi Fries and Leonardo DiCaprio got his laughing gear around a Hobnob flapjack.
The other intensely British thing was the red-carpet appearance of the Prince and Princess of Wales (the former being Bafta’s president); their presence enforced that other terribly British tradition of everyone, as if in a Mike Leigh film, avoiding the subject. Everyone trying not to talk or think about the elephant in the room or the elephant slumped and stricken in the speeding car on the way home from the police station. Well, at least William never liked him.
And a British star gave us the biggest upset: Hollywood A-listers in the best leading actor list like DiCaprio and Chalamet were sensationally beaten by English up-and-comer Robert Aramayo, who got the top acting award along with the rising star Bafta. This was for his terrific performance in the marvellously warm and emotionally generous movie I Swear about the life and times of Tourette syndrome campaigner John Davidson, who has struggled throughout his life both with his condition and with people’s attitudes, and was also in the audience. It was the thoroughly well-deserved feelgood moment of the night (I had also been hoping for an award for Peter Mullan playing Davidson’s big-hearted mentor) and a moment to remind us that the Baftas can occasionally reward very British films at Hollywood’s expense.
Otherwise the night resoundingly went to Paul Thomas Anderson’s amazing counterculture fantasia One Battle After Another, an realist cheese-dream of resistance to Trump and the ICE roundups in an semi-fictionalised America. Sean Penn won best supporting actor for his role as a reactionary military blowhard dedicated to stamping out subversives, and his pugnacious, dead-eyed face and jarhead haircut are eerily similar to that of Trump’s real life ICE border patrol commander Greg Bovino. It was a moment of instinctive Zeitgeist intuition from Anderson.
Disappointingly, perhaps, Josh Safdie’s dizzying sports comedy Marty Supreme, with Timothée Chalamet as the bantamweight ping-pong champ, did not trouble the scorer at all. But superb Irish performer Jessie Buckley got her much-anticipated Bafta for playing Agnes (or Anne) Hathaway in the speculative period drama Hamnet. (It’s a film which has suffered this year’s traditional op-ed backlash, from people who have declared themselves unconvinced that Hamnet’s death had anything to do with the play. I too am unconvinced about that – but that is not the point of this passionate, audacious film.)
On the night, Ryan Coogler’s almost unclassifiable vampire thriller Sinners, among other things a satirical attack on white consumption of black culture, showed that it was a real prize contender with three Baftas including best supporting actress for Wunmi Mosaku. This film showed that Sinners is still cutting through. There will be a lot of smart money on it for major Oscar success next month. Elsewhere, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein was rewarded with three Baftas that recognised how intricately beautiful this film looks and feels.
The international film award went to Joachim Trier’s cinephile family drama Sentimental Value, a movie much talked-about among Bafta voters, but not, in my view, in the same league as his previous film The Worst Person In The World. I was delighted to see the outstanding British debut Bafta – the Bafta that normally means the most to the recipient’s career – going to Akinola Davies Jr’s marvellous and intensely personal film My Father’s Shadow.
The night, and the bragging rights, belonged to Aramayo. But the overall winner was that remarkable film-maker Anderson, who just seems to get more complex and ambitious with every movie he directs.
