Whatever else happened at this year’s Bafta ceremony, it provided us with a very exciting star-is-born moment. Mikey Madison broke ahead of a densely packed crowd of best-actress contenders (in which only the hapless Karla Sofía Gascón was really lagging behind) to win the Bafta for her wonderfully smart, funny, charismatic and vulnerable performance in Sean Baker’s Anora, playing a New York table dancer who gets a Vegas wedding to a Russian oligarch’s son. Her final closeup scene in that film is a thrilling masterclass in complexity. I admit that I myself had been rooting for Marianne Jean-Baptiste for her performance in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, but who could possibly begrudge Madison her night of triumph?
Otherwise, the night’s big winner was Edward Berger’s superbly classy and sleek Vatican conspiracy drama Conclave, based on the Robert Harris bestseller; it was level pegging in terms of numbers with The Brutalist, but carried off the evening’s top prize. Conclave is the movie whose blue-chip excellence all round made it a firm favourite with Bafta voters, who were thrilled by Ralph Fiennes’s lead performance as the troubled cardinal; they were diverted by its visual flourishes, amused by its intelligent but approachable dialogue on religious issues and vastly entertained by its twist ending. Strict anti-spoiler rules dictate that we can’t fully discuss how this film in fact is part of a contemporary debate exhaustively analysed elsewhere.
The Brutalist can count itself as the almost-joint winner; I was delighted to see Brady Corbet get best director for this mysterious and monumental drama, which also got best cinematography, and a best actor Bafta for Adrien Brody’s angular, arresting, gauntly passionate lead performance. It’s a Randian parable of a Hungarian Holocaust survivor and architect, played by Brody, who makes his name in the postwar US courtesy of a highly strung and vindictive sponsor, played by Guy Pearce, who sets out to create and then destroy the talent that he has nurtured. (And incidentally, there hasn’t been a bigger onscreen promotion for Ayn Rand since the scene in TV’s Mad Men when eccentric ad mogul Bert Cooper tells Don Draper that he really ought to read Atlas Shrugged.)
It’s heartening to see so much Bafta love go to a comedy (although it had to be a comedy on a deeply serious issue) and A Real Pain – the story of two New York Jewish cousins going on a Holocaust tour of Poland – is a joy, getting best original screenplay for Jesse Eisenberg’s sparkling script and best supporting actor for Kieran Culkin’s hyperactive, hilarious and unexpectedly subtle performance. It’s a masterclass in intimately detailed and very funny drama.
There is no Bafta for worst PR campaign but there’s no doubt who would have won. The hilariously embarrassing mess over the old tweets of Emilia Pérez star Gascón, in which she unveiled gruesomely bigoted thoughts about Hitler, George Floyd, Islam and indeed diversity at the Oscars – that last being the very issue which Netflix was hoping to clinch an Oscar for Gascón – was of course a farrago which, as I cautiously predicted, did not utterly destroy the film’s chances overall, and it won best non-English-language film and best supporting actress for the estimable Zoe Saldaña, for whom awards season has clearly been an awful trial. (And it’s something to ponder that before social media, Gascón would have just said or even silently thought these fatuously offensive things without them being preserved for ever in an archive of shame.)
In truth, Emilia Pérez is a middling and overpraised film and one of the weakest of this year’s awards season favourites. However, it is an interesting example of that kind of movie about which there is not a critical disagreement, but a kind of two-way optical illusion, like the white-and-gold dress/blue-and-black dress phenomenon in the 2015 viral photo. To some, Emilia Pérez looks like a grotesquely conceited tone-deaf mess for which mockery is a righteous punching-up duty. To others, it’s a gloriously bonkers extravagant melodrama whose very implausibility is a part of its defiant energy and reach. (Much the same thing happened with Lars von Trier’s bizarre Björk tragedy-musical Dancer in the Dark a generation ago.)
Conversely, the most heartening underdog victory at the Baftas has to be the remarkable success of Kneecap, the fictionalised true story of the Irish-language hip-hop band which got outstanding British debut, the entry-level Bafta which is the heart and soul of the evening, and the award which probably means most to the recipient. I was not entirely enthusiastic about the film but its sheer energy and infectious self-belief has been a joy to see, and it’s great to think that Kneecap have provided the soundtrack to this year’s Bafta night.
