Oppenheimer bags seven awards, including Best Picture, at BAFTA

Atom bomb epic Oppenheimer won seven prizes, including best picture, director and actor, at the 77th British Academy Film Awards on Sunday, cementing its front-runner status for the Oscars next month.
Gothic fantasia Poor Things took five prizes 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.
Oppenheimer had a field-leading 13 nominations, but missed out on the record of nine trophies, set in 1971 by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It won the best film race against Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, Anatomy of a Fall and The Holdovers. Oppenheimer also won trophies 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 . 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.
Ukraine war documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, produced by The Associated Press 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.” Chernov said the story of the city and its fall into Russian occupation “is a symbol of struggle and a symbol of faith. Thank you for empowering our voice.”
The awards ceremony, was hosted by Doctor Who star David Tennant.The prize for original screenplay went to French courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall. Cord Jefferson won the adapted screenplay prize for the satirical American Fiction,” about the struggles of an African-American novelist Jefferson.
Britain’s film academy introduced changes to increase the awards’ diversity in 2020, when no women were nominated as best director for the seventh year running and all 20 nominees in the lead and supporting performer categories were white.
However, Triet was the only woman among this year’s 6 best-director nominees.
The Rising Star award, the only category decided by public vote, went to Mia McKenna-Bruce, star of “How to Have Sex.”
Guest of honour was Prince William, in his role as president of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.
Film curator June Givanni, was honoured for outstanding British contribution to cinema, while actress Samantha Morton received the academy’s highest honour, the BAFTA Fellowship. (IANS)