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.
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.
Check out the full list of this year’s BAFTA Awards winners below:
BEST FILM
BOYHOOD
Richard Linklater, Cathleen Sutherland
LEADING ACTRESS
JULIANNE MOORE
Still Alice
LEADING ACTOR
EDDIE REDMAYNE
The Theory of Everything
DIRECTOR
BOYHOOD
Richard Linklater
EE RISING STAR
Jack O’Connell
COSTUME DESIGN
THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL
Milena Canonero
ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING
Anthony McCarten
FILM NOT IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE
IDA
Pawel Pawlikowski, Eric Abraham, Piotr Dzieciol, Ewa Puszczynska
ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL
Wes Anderson
OUTSTANDING DEBUT BY A BRITISH WRITER, DIRECTOR OR PRODUCER
STEPHEN BERESFORD (Writer), DAVID LIVINGSTONE (Producer)
Pride
CINEMATOGRAPHY
BIRDMAN
Emmanuel Lubezki
SUPPORTING ACTRESS
PATRICIA ARQUETTE
Boyhood
SUPPORTING ACTOR
J.K. SIMMONS
Whiplash
SPECIAL VISUAL EFFECTS
INTERSTELLAR
Paul Franklin, Scott Fisher, Andrew Lockley
ANIMATED FILM
THE LEGO MOVIE
Phil Lord, Christopher Miller
SOUND
WHIPLASH
Thomas Curley, Ben Wilkins, Craig Mann
EDITING
WHIPLASH
Tom Cross
BRITISH SHORT ANIMATION
THE BIGGER PICTURE
Chris Hees, Daisy Jacobs, Jennifer Majka
BRITISH SHORT FILM
BOOGALOO AND GRAHAM
Brian J. Falconer, Michael Lennox, Ronan Blaney
PRODUCTION DESIGN
THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL
Adam Stockhausen, Anna Pinnock
MAKE UP & HAIR
THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL
Frances Hannon
DOCUMENTARY
CITIZENFOUR
Laura Poitras
ORIGINAL MUSIC
THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL
Alexandre Desplat
OUTSTANDING BRITISH FILM
THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING
James Marsh, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Lisa Bruce, Anthony McCarten