A handful of Oscar wins for technical and writing achievement spared the UK’s blushes on a night when the country failed to walk away with any of the high-profile acting and directing awards.
Veteran playwright and author Peter Straughan was perhaps the biggest name among the British successes, picking up best adapted screenplay for the tense religious drama Conclave.
It is Straughan’s first Oscar and comes 13 years after he was nominated in the same category for his adaptation of John Le Carre’s spy thriller Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Epic period drama The Brutalist was responsible for two more first-time British winners: Lol Crawley, who won best cinematography, and Daniel Blumberg, who picked up best original score.
Cinematography has proved something of an Oscars success story for the UK in recent years, with British talent winning the award four times in the past decade.
The acting Oscars are increasingly resembling a lost cause for the UK, however.
There were no British wins in any of the four acting categories – the fourth year in a row this has occurred.
This is the longest gap for a UK acting win since 1998.
Better news came in the category for best production design, which was won by Nathan Crowley and Lee Sandales for their dazzling visual work on the musical fantasy Wicked.
Oscar success for Crowley has been a long time coming: first nominated in 2007, he has clocked up a total of seven nominations across his career, missing out each time until now.
His collaborator on Wicked, Sandales, is also a first-time winner, having been nominated three times.
The science fiction blockbuster Dune: Part Two saw the UK win two further Academy Awards.
Paul Lambert was among the team handed the Oscar for best visual effects.
It is his fourth victory in this category, following wins in 2018 for Blade Runner 2049, in 2019 for First Man, and in 2022 for the first part of Dune.
Dune also delivered UK success in the category of best sound, the winning team including British mixer and engineer Gareth John.
There were some high-profile British misses.
Sir Elton John had a chance of securing the third Oscar of his career, for the song Never Too Late, co-written with his long-time collaborator Bernie Taupin plus US artists Brandi Carlile and Andrew Watt.
The track appears in the documentary of the same name, which focuses on Sir Elton’s recent farewell tour.
But the award for best original song went instead to El Mal, from the musical Emilia Perez.
The UK had a strong contender in the category for best animated feature film, in the shape of Bafta-winning Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.
A win would have represented the UK’s first victory in this category since 2006, when – in a neat bit of symmetry – the award went to Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit.
In the end, the Oscar went to another animal-based animation, the dialogue-free film Flow, which is a co-production by Latvia, France and Belgium.
The British trio of Laura Blount, Frances Hannon and Sarah Nuth were nominated for best make-up and hairstyling for Wicked, but lost out to the all-French team that worked on body horror film The Substance.
The UK’s overall tally of six Oscar wins is one down on 2024, but higher than the average per year since the start of the century, which is five.
