'Oppenheimer' conquers the BAFTAs with 7 awards, including best film

'Oppenheimer', Christopher Nolan's blockbuster about the development of the atomic bomb, conquered the stage at the EE British Academy Film Awards in London on Sunday.

The film won seven awards at the British Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director for Nolan and Best Actor for Cillian Murphy for his portrayal of physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.

It beat out four other nominees for the best picture award, including “Poor Things,” Yorgos Lanthimos' take on a Frankenstein story and “The Holdovers,” Alexander Payne's comedy about a boarding school teacher who had to care for a student during the holidays . It was also better than “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese's three-and-a-half-hour epic about the Osage killings of the 1920s, and “Anatomy of a Fall,” Justine Triet's multilingual courtroom drama about a woman accused of killing her. husband.

In the days leading up to the awards, known as the BAFTAs, most British film critics predicted that “Oppenheimer” would win big. Tom Shine, writing in The Times of London, said Nolan's “magnum opus” was an instant classic. “Sometimes the frontrunner is the frontrunner for a reason,” he added.

Still, the awards were Nolan's first directorial wins at the BAFTAs, despite several previous nominations for his films “Inception” and “Dunkirk.”

At the ceremony at London's Royal Festival Hall, Nolan, who grew up in London, seemed a little overwhelmed by all the accolades. He accepted the award for best director and called the award “an incredible honor.” He then reminisced about his parents dragging him as a boy to the festival hall, a large classical music venue. In fact, he said, his younger brother, now also a TV producer and filmmaker, beat him to the venue stage “by about 40 years” because he had once taken part in a performance of “The Nutcracker.”

Murphy accepted the best actor award and also seemed shocked. “Holy moly!” he said, before thanking Nolan and producer Emma Thomas, Nolan's wife, for letting him play Oppenheimer's “hulking, gnarled, complex character.” Nolan and Thomas saw “something in me that I probably didn't see in myself,” Murphy added.

Among the other awards for “Oppenheimer” were best supporting actor for Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, the Oppenheimer's arch-enemy who insisted that he would lead the Atomic Energy Commission only if Oppenheimer were removed from his advisory role; best original score; best editing; and best cinematography.

These wins come just weeks after the film took home five of the top awards at this year's Golden Globes, and will be seen by many as further boosting its chances at next month's Oscars, especially as BAFTA – and Oscar voting bodies overlap.

Even as “Oppenheimer” dominated the event, several other films did well. 'Poor Things' won five awards, including Best Lead Actress for Emma Stone. Stone, an American, accepted that award and first thanked Neil Swain, her dialect coach, for teaching her how to speak with a British accent. “He didn't laugh at me when he taught me to say 'water,'” she said, to laughter from the audience. The other awards were for makeup and hair, costume, special visual effects and production design.

'The Zone of Interest', Jonathan Glazer's arthouse film about the daily life of a German family near the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust, also did well and won three awards, including best film not in the English language. language is written. contested category in which it surpasses both 'Anatomy of a Fall' and 'Past Lives', Celine Song's romantic film about two childhood friends who keep reuniting later in life.

One of the other notable winners was Da'Vine Joy Randolph, who took home the Best Supporting Actress award for her performance as a school cook mourning the death of her son in “The Holdovers.”

Randolph is also nominated in the Best Supporting Actress category at this year's Oscars, scheduled for March 10.