Oscar Buzz Helps Banshees in Addition to All Quiet on the Western Front Bafta Win

By Wilbert On Feb 20, 2023

All Quiet on the Western Front, a revisionist German war film, won a staggering seven at the British Academy Film Awards in London, including best picture and director for Edward Berger.

Nobody expected the Netflix movie based on Erich Maria Remarque’s 1929 novel about an idealistic German soldier deployed to the trenches to make as much money off of its record-equal 14 nominations last month.

“It’s just incredible,” said producer Malte Grunert, picking up the best film prize. He spoke of how the story, about a generation “poisoned by right-wing propaganda into thinking war is an adventure” spoke to today as much as to the time in which the book was written or set.

The movie also won awards for best film not in the English language, cinematography, adapted screenplay, original score, and best sound; this remarkable run of success makes it the first foreign language movie to win more than four Baftas (Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon did so in 2001). It is encouraging for the nine Oscar nominations it is up for.

Before the first anniversary of the commencement of the war with Russia, Berger urged the audience as he accepted the award for best director to keep the Ukrainian people in their thoughts. The Banshees of Inisherin, which has made tremendous progress in this year’s Oscar competition, was the other notable prize of the evening.

Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson’s characters in Martin McDonagh’s bleak comedy, about buddies who fought in 1920s Ireland, won awards for outstanding British picture, best original screenplay, best supporting actor for Barry Keoghan, and best supporting actress for Kerry Condon.

When accepting the award for best British film, McDonagh tried to explain how his movie won the prize. Film4 provided significant money; the replacement donkey, Rosie, is from Stoke-on-Trent.

Austin Butler unexpectedly won the leading actor award for the Baz Luhrmann biopic Elvis, one of four Oscars it received (the others were casting, costume and makeup and hair). Butler, who won the award over finalists Farrell, Brendan Fraser, and Bill Nighy, honored the Presley family as he concluded his speech.

He said:

“I cannot thank you guys enough,”

“Your love and for showing me who Elvis truly was. I hope I’ve made you proud.”

Speaking to reporters backstage, Butler touched on the death of Lisa Marie Presley shortly after the Golden Globes last month. He said:

“It’s an unimaginably tragic time,”

“Grief is a long process.”

Meanwhile Cate Blanchett was named best actress for her role as an imperious conductor in Todd Field’s Tár, a film she described on stage as:

“a very dangerous and potentially career-ending undertaking”.

Blanchett thanked for family as “it took me away from you an enormous lot.” She singled out her “mum for holding the fort and my four extraordinary children” before ending her speech by paying tribute to Field. she said, looking at her award, but Tár:

“This is wonderful,”

“has changed my life.”

Speaking to reporters backstage, Cate Blanchett said she was “slightly overwhelmed” by her victory:

“It’s been such an exceptional year for female performers. There have been so many idiosyncratic, particular performances which I’ve been inspired by. For me to receive this is extraordinary and a very meaningful honour.”

Blanchett added that the character of Lydia Tár “couldn’t be further away” from her own experience:

“but perhaps where I deeply connected with her circumstance – she’s more than a character, she’s a special crisis – is that she’s coming to the end of something, the end of a teaching cycle, an artistic cycle.”

She compared this to her own experience of turning 50, adding that the only opportunity out of the pandemic was to:

“make changes you’ve wanted to make for a very long time”.

Meanwhile, Condon’s victory signaled the start of a dramatic moment in the ceremony that was cut from the TV broadcast. Troy Kotsur, who took home the supporting actor Bafta for his performance in Coda last year, gave her the honor.

Kotsur, deaf signed the message, but his interpreter misunderstood it as Carey Mulligan, who was nominated for her part in the underappreciated Harvey Weinstein film She Said. When Mulligan’s name was mentioned, there was a collective gasp heard across the Royal Festival Hall because she was unlikely to win.

The mistake was fixed about ten seconds later, when Mulligan stood up and headed for the stage. Due to the uproar, the ceremony began with an unexpected echo of the 2017 Academy Awards’ crescendo, when Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty initially declared Moonlight as best picture before correcting themselves.

Other from that, the 76th Baftas were a fun event that an exhausted Richard E. Grant hosted. Although bowing to everyone else in the room, a moderate script made Grant’s ambition and excitement the brunt of the joke.

He said, about Will Smith’s attack on presenter Chris Rock at last March’s Oscars:

“Nobody on my watch gets slapped tonight,”

“Well, only on the back.”

On introducing the show’s in memoriam segment, Grant briefly lost control of himself because he had lost his wife, the dialect coach Joan Washington, in 2021. Hugh Hudson, Angela Lansbury, Raquel Welch, Jean-Luc Godard, Leslie Phillips, Ray Liotta, Anne Heche, Sylvia Syms, and Robbie Coltrane were among the actors and directors remembered this year.

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The triumph of Berger and McDonagh’s films came at the expense of Everything Everywhere All at Once, another Oscar front-runner. The absurd multiverse comedy directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert won just one award—best editing—while Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical drama The Fabelmans—the only category in which it was nominated for a Bafta—failed to win for original script.

Young Scottish filmmaker Charlotte Wells, whose movie Aftersun won top honors in critics’ polls last year, including the Guardian’s, had a fantastic debut. Her journey with her late father served as the inspiration for the movie, which stars Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio as a father and daughter vacationing in Turkey in the late 1990s.

In her speech, Wells said that the film had been described as:

“a eulogy of sorts to my dad.” “By definition,”

She continued:

“he’s not here. But my mum is and always has been, so this is for her. Literally, as I overpacked.”

Navalny, a documentary by Daniel Roher on the attempted poisoning murder of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in 2020, received the prize for best documentary. The movie includes in-depth interviews with the recovering Navalny and follows the pursuit of the truth by reporters Christo Grozev and Maria Pevchikh on Putin’s possible involvement.

Last week, Grozev tweeted that he and his family had been banned from attending the ceremony because he posed “a public security risk.” On stage, Roher said the world:

“must not be afraid to stand against authoritarianism in all its forms”.

https://twitter.com/christogrozev/status/1626486319349374977

Speaking backstage, Navalny producer Odessa Rae said:

“It’s deeply saddening for us. Christo was actually the introduction to this film for us, he led us to meet Alexei Navalny. He’s such an important part of this film.”

Despite being present for the ceremony, the Prince and Princess of Wales did not speak on stage. A portion honoring the late Queen Elizabeth II, who presided over the Bafta awards ceremony and played the titular role in Stephen Frears’ 2006 film The Queen, was delivered by Helen Mirren.