BAFTA's 11th Hour Oscar Surprises

Yahoo

19-02-2025

A version of this story first appeared on The Ankler.
BAFTA Adds Fresh Intrigue to the Oscar Race
Oscar season was speaking with an English accent this weekend, with many of the race's top contenders making the trip to London for Sunday's BAFTA Awards. The fact that a slew of additional guild awards took place the night before didn't even slow major contenders' roll. During Saturday night's WGA Awards, held in both New York and Los Angeles, the top two screenplay prizes were handed out first specifically so that the recipients, Anora writer-director Sean Baker (for original screenplay) and Nickel Boys' auteur RaMell Ross and his co-writer Joslyn Barnes (for adapted screenplay) could catch their flights to London immediately after.The change of location also made for a slight mood shift in the Oscar race, just a week after Anora's huge wins with the Critics Choice, Directors Guild and Producers Guild awards marked it as an Oscar frontrunner. The top BAFTA award for best film went to Conclave, which — with London-based producers Tessa Ross and Juliette Howell as well as star Ralph Fiennes — was the closest to a hometown favorite in the race.Some pundits expected Conclave to have an edge in London over the very American Anora, but a more interesting upset came in the directing category, where The Brutalist's Brady Corbet triumphed. Add to that Adrien Brody's win for best actor, a category he now seems to have sewn up, and victories for score and cinematography, and The Brutalist got a much-needed boost from BAFTA at exactly the right moment. Final Oscar ballots, after all, are due on Tuesday at 5 p.m.Mere hours after its WGA win, Anora also lost at the BAFTAs to Jesse Eisenberg's screenplay for A Real Pain, which seemed to be fading in the Oscar screenplay race given its lack of a best picture nomination. But by beating out not just Anora but also The Brutalist and The Substance at the BAFTAs, A Real Pain is displaying some strength in screenplay (as well as supporting actor, of course, where Kieran Culkin has a pretty clear path after Golden Globe, Critics Choice and BAFTA wins). The BAFTAs seemed to be eager to spread the wealth among a range of winners. Might the Oscars be inclined to do the same?
No Moore in London
Anora may not have widened its lead over the competition, but it scored a major surprise victory of its own, with Mikey Madison winning best actress over presumed favorite Demi Moore. I still suspect the SAG Awards next weekend will be eager to crown Moore and her unbeatable comeback story, and that the Academy will follow suit. But Madison's victory suggests not only that she's competitive, but that best actress may be more in play than expected. I'm Still Here star Fernanda Torres wasn't nominated at BAFTA, but you'd better believe her campaign team is paying attention to last night's results.In an awards race that had felt so very wide open until recently, I wouldn't call any of this earth-shattering. I had a hunch that Anora's string of victories last weekend might have been squeakers, given how many films have received industry accolades this season. It's still possible Anora could make Baker the first person since Walt Disney himself to win four Oscars in a single year — Baker shares the film's nomination for picture (with his wife, Samantha Quan, and Alex Coco) in addition to his solo noms for director, original screenplay, and editing. But I think some space has opened, just a bit, for a wider group of winners to take home Oscars.Imagine a slightly tweaked version of the BAFTAs, where A Real Pain wins original screenplay, Corbet wins director, something like Wicked or Conclave wins in editing, and Moore wins best actress. Anora could lose all of those categories, but that still wouldn't make its best picture win feel any less likely. Last week it became the first film in the history of Critics Choice to win best picture and no other award. If it does the same at the Oscars, it will become the first to do so since Grand Hotel way back in 1932.
Sing Along
Few people understand better than Guillermo del Toro how surreal it can be when, after years of toiling away at your work in varying levels of obscurity, you suddenly find the awards season spotlight shining on you. It happened for del Toro in 2018, when his tenth feature film, The Shape of Water, won four Oscars, including best picture and best director.
And now it's happening for Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar, whose film Sing Sing is nominated for three Oscars, including for the screenplay Bentley and Kwedar wrote in collaboration with two of the story's real-life inspirations, Clarence Maclin (who also acts in the film) and John 'Divine G' Whitfield (portrayed onscreen by Colman Domingo, who's also nominated). 'You guys are on a roll,' del Toro said to Bentley and Kwedar at the beginning of a recent Zoom call (shared with Prestige Junkie by Sing Sing's awards team), which you can watch exclusively above. Fresh off their latest trip to Sundance, where the Bentley-directed Train Dreams became one of the festival's breakout hits and few sales (to Netflix), they can only describe it as, well, surreal. 'We feel like we've just been operating in our little sandbox for a few years now, and it's lovely that all of this is happening,' Bentley adds.
Del Toro starts by asking about the division of labor within Bentley and Kwedar's long-running partnership, in which they develop films together and take turns directing. 'Usually whoever is going to end up directing the film originated the idea and it just kind of fit into their bones,' says Kwedar, who directed Sing Sing. 'And then the other identifies that in their friend that this is something they have to do.'
Kwedar's journey with Sing Sing began nearly a decade ago, when he read about the Rehabilitation Through the Arts program at New York's Sing Sing prison and sought out the program's director, Brent Buell. After meeting with Buell and some of the program's veterans, both Bentley and Kwedar left feeling that 'if we could just translate the feeling of this room into a film, we'd have something special,' Kwedar recalls. 'We thought it would be very easy to do that. And then it took eight and a half years.'
Del Toro may have never made a movie quite like Sing Sing — his next project, a new take on Frankenstein, is due later this year — but you can sense his genuine admiration for what they accomplished. 'This movie took basically a decade to make and then put in a compression chamber of having to shoot it in 18 days,' he says in awe. 'I mean my fastest movie was Kronos, and I shot that in 41 days.'
'Holy shit, that sounds luxurious,' Bentley responds.
Hear the full conversation in the video above, and thanks to del Toro, Bentley and Kwedar for letting us eavesdrop.