BAFTA Awards Give Boyhood Best Picture, Best Director Prizes

Ladies and gentlemen, we have ourselves an honest-to-goodness Best Picture race. Last night, Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s DGA win for Best Director seemed to solidify Birdman as the frontrunner for the big prize at the Oscars, but the BAFTAs have thrown us a curveball by awarding the other heavyweight, Boyhood, Best Picture and Best Director for Richard Linklater. Though the overlap of membership between the guilds and the Academy is more significant than the overlap between BAFTA voters and the Academy, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards is a solid gauge of how a large voting body in which members vote on all categories will turn out.

And while it’s true that Birdman’s hat trick of the SAG, PGA, and DGA awards is both rare and formidable, the BAFTA Award winner for Best Picture has matched up with the Oscar winner for Best Picture for the past six years running (ie. the years in which the Academy expanded the Best Picture field and moved to a preferential ballot). In other words, as with last year’s 12 Years a Slave and Gravity sprint to the finish, we’ve got ourselves a race that’s turning out to be closer than expected. Look for more of my analysis on where things stand in a more extensive Oscar Beat later this week.

the-theory-of-everything-image-eddie-redmayne — Image via Focus Features

Elsewhere at the BAFTA Awards, Eddie Redmayne continued his run of picking up Best Actor trophies left and right for The Theory of Everything, and in a bit of a surprise, the Stephen Hawking biopic took home the Best British Film award over The Imitation Game. The film that won the most awards was The Grand Budapest Hotel, which picked up 5 in all, including Original Screenplay and Music, while Whiplash won Editing, Sound, and Best Supporting Actor for J.K. Simmons. And The LEGO Movie's awards season run in the Best Animated Film category ends here with a win, appropriately enough.