La La Land wins 5 BAFTAs

The hot favourite going into the British Academy Film Awards, the first original musical for decades, La La Land, has delivered on its promise, taking BAFTAs in five of the eleven categories in which it was nominated, including Best Film and Best Director for Damien Chazelle.

Emma Stone won one of La La Land’s 5 BAFTAs but Ryan Gosling missed out

Emma Stone beat fellow-Oscar-nominees Jackie‘s Natalie Portman and Florence Foster Jenkins’ Meryl Streep to the Best Actress honours and the film was also honoured for its cinematography and – fittingly for a musical – its music, written by Justin Hurwitz.

Stone’s co-star Ryan Gosling missed out in the Best Actor category to Casey Affleck, for Manchester By The Sea, whose writer-director Kenneth Lonergan also took home the award for the Best Original Screenplay.

Lion also won two BAFTAs; Dev Patel for Best Supporting Actor and Luke Davies for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Viola Davis was named BAFTA’s Best Supporting Actress for Denzel Washington’s Fences

The other acting award, for Best Supporting Actress, went to Viola Davis for Fences – a leading contender for the Oscars, later this month.

BAFTA gave its Best Foreign Language Film to last year’s Oscar-winner, the Holocaust drama Son of Saul.

With many BAFTA members also being Oscar voters, the BAFTAs are worth following with an eye to predicting Oscar success, but the British Academy is not the most reliable indicator, not least because British voters have a tendency towards supporting home-grown talent, while some categories are open only to British films in the first place.

Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or winning I, Daniel Blake picked up its only major award since Cannes as BAFTA’s Outstanding British Film, beating – among others – the Iranian-language Under The Shadow, which was named the Outstanding British debut, for writer-director Babak Anvari and producers Emily Leo, Oliver Roskill and Lucan Toh.

And its only natural for an awards body to favour talent from its own country, so in the possibly parochial way that BAFTA chose British star Dev Patel as the Best Supporting Actor, the American Academy might be more inclined to pick Moonlight‘s Mahershala Ali. Having said that, of course, parochial voting didn’t help Britain’s Andrew Garfield see off Casey Affleck in the Best Actor category.

And any level of parochial voting couldn’t help British film-making avoid one of its poorest showings at the BAFTAs for a decade, with only eight awards going to films with UK funding and four of them being in categories available only to British films.

But with just two weeks to go until the industry’s biggest night, La La Land is continuing to look untouchable as the film to beat, while the next most-nominated films by BAFTA, Arrival and Nocturnal Animals, and Oscar’s second-placed Moonlight, have generally fared less well on the big night, with those trophies not taken by La La Land being fairly evenly shared.

The full list of BAFTA winners is as follows:

Best film

La La Land

 

Outstanding British film

I, Daniel Blake

 

Director

Damien Chazelle – La La Land

 

Leading actress

Emma Stone – La La Land

 

Leading actor

Casey Affleck – Manchester by the Sea

 

Supporting actress

Viola Davis – Fences

 

Supporting actor

Dev Patel – Lion

 

Original screenplay

Manchester by the Sea – Kenneth Lonergan

 

Adapted screenplay

Lion – Luke Davies

 

Outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer

Under the Shadow – Babak Anvari (writer/director), Emily Leo, Oliver Roskill, Lucan Toh (producers)

 

Film not in the English language

Son of Saul – Laszlo Nemes, Gabor Sipos

 

Documentary

13th

 

Animated film

Kubo and the Two Strings

 

Original music

La La Land – Justin Hurwitz

 

Cinematography

La La Land – Linus Sandgren

 

Editing

Hacksaw Ridge – John Gilbert

 

Production design

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them – Stuart Craig, Anna Pinnock

 

Costume design

Jackie – Madeline Fontaine

 

Make-up and hair

Florence Foster Jenkins – J Roy Helland, Daniel Phillips

 

Sound

Arrival – Claude La Haye, Bernard Gariepy Strobl, Sylvain Bellemare

 

Special visual effects

The Jungle Book – Robert Legato, Dan Lemmon, Andrew R. Jones, Adam Valdez

 

British short animation

A Love Story – Khaled Gad, Anushka Kishani Naanayakkara, Elena Ruscombe-King

 

British short film

Home – Shpat Deda, Afolabi Kuti, Daniel Mulloy, Scott O’Donnell

 

EE Rising Star award (voted for by the public)

Tom Holland

 

BAFTA Fellowship

Mel Brooks