Oppenheimer Adds to Trophies

Film wins seven awards, with ' Poor Things' just behind
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Feb 18, 2024 3:35 PM CST
Oppenheimer Dominates BAFTAs
Emma Stone, left, winner of the leading actress award for 'Poor Things', and Idris Elba pose for photographers at the 77th British Academy Film Awards, BAFTA's, in London, Sunday, Feb. 18, 2024.   (Photo by Vianney Le Caer/Invision/AP)

Oppenheimer won seven prizes, including best picture, director and actor, at the 77th British Academy Film Awards in London on Sunday, cementing its front-runner status for the Oscars next month. Gothic fantasia Poor Things took five prizes, the AP reports, and Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest won three. Christopher Nolan won his first best director BAFTA for Oppenheimer, and Cillian Murphy won the best actor prize for playing physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. Murphy said he was grateful for the opportunity to play such a "colossally knotty, complex character." The film led the field with 13 nominations.

It won the best film race over Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, Anatomy of a Fall, and The Holdovers. Barbie was not nominated, nor was director Greta Gerwig. Oppenheimer also won for editing, cinematography, and musical score, as well as the best supporting actor prize for Robert Downey Jr. Emma Stone was named best actress for playing the wild and spirited Bella Baxter in Poor Things, a steampunk-style visual extravaganza that won prizes for visual effects, production design, costume design, and makeup and hair. Da'Vine Joy Randolph was named best supporting actress for playing a boarding school cook in The Holdovers and said she felt a "responsibility I don't take lightly" to tell the stories of underrepresented people like her character, Mary.

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, and also took the prize for its sound, which has been described as the real star of the film. Jonathan Glazer's unsettling drama takes place in a family home just outside the walls of the Auschwitz death camp, whose horrors are heard and hinted at rather than seen. The Ukraine war documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, produced by the AP 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."

(More BAFTA stories.)

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