Not with the violence of an atomic explosion in the New Mexico desert, but rather with the gentleness of the tides and ebbs and flows of the Thames River, but Oppenheimer was the winning film at the Bafta awards (from the British Film Academy ), and continues its inexorable advance towards the Oscars, for which it has thirteen nominations.
The winning pool of the Golden Globes (Christopher Nolan as director, Cillian Murphy as best actor, Robert Downing Jr. as supporting actor and the drama about the development of the first nuclear bomb at Los Alamos) was repeated at the Royal Festival Hall in London , in a colorful but strictly millimeter ceremony, lasting just two hours, with all of Hollywood present (in addition to William, the Prince of Wales), and the Scot David Tennant acting as presenter, with a kilt among his outfits.
Juan Antonio Bayona - whose film The Snow Society swept the Goya Awards and is a candidate for best foreign film at the Oscars - was deprived of the statuette in the non-English language film category for The Zone of Interest, by Jonathan Glazer, inspired by the novel by Martin Amis about a Nazi leader (Rudolf Höss) who settles with his family in a fabulous chalet with a swimming pool right next to the Auschwitz concentration camp, of which he is commander. The winner played with a double deck because it was in German but financed with English money, and also took home the prize for best British film and best sound.
The producer, James Wilson, spoke on stage about the danger of building walls and barriers, and said – in one of the most applauded interventions of the evening – that “the world should worry the same about the innocent people who die in Palestine and Yemen than what does it in Mariupol or Israel.” On the red carpet earlier, filmmaker Ken Loach had held up a banner calling for an end to the ongoing massacre in the Gaza Strip.
The silver medal at the Bafta 2024 went to Poor Creatures, the bizarre visual hallucination by the Greek Yorgos Lanthimos about a woman with the brain of a girl revived by a brilliant but unorthodox scientist, which won five awards, including best actress for the North American Emma Stone, beating rivals such as Carey Mulligan for Maestro. His compatriot Da'vine Joy Randolph was chosen as best supporting actor for Those Who Remain, in which Paul Giamatti plays a magnificent role as a teacher at an exclusive boarding school in Massachusetts who stays with a group of boys while the rest go on vacation with your families.
For Christopher Nolan, one of the most acclaimed British directors of his generation (he was born in London to an English father and an American mother), this is the first Bafta, despite eight previous nominations and a brilliant career with films such as Tenet and Dunkirk. In his acceptance speech, he highlighted as necessary the bitter tone with which Oppenheimer ends, with the German physicist expressing the fear that the atomic bomb, instead of preventing the end of the world, would accelerate it. Along these lines, he thanked all the organizations that have fought for nuclear disarmament since the sixties for their work.
Twenty Days in Mariupol, a chilling account of the first three weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, won the Bafta for best documentary, and American Fiction (about the contradictions of the publishing industry) took the award for best adapted screenplay. But among the films that went empty are the excellent Anatomy of a Fall (Sandra Hüller was nominated for best actress, and also for best supporting supporting role for The Zone of Interest), and Barbie, whose box office success has not been translated for now. in prizes.
Michael Fox arrived on stage in a wheelchair, physically greatly weakened by the Parkinson's disease that was detected at the age of twenty-nine, to present the Bafta for best film to Oppenheimer's producer, Emma Thomas, Nolan's wife. The great star of Back to the Future has so far raised two billion euros for charity.
The Oscars are a very different movie, and the sensibility of the Hollywood Academy has its own dynamic. But after the success of the Golden Globes and the Baftas, Oppenheimer seems the favorite for the triple crown.
