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 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.
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