If awards ceremonies tap into currents, trends and the hive-mind unconscious, then this year’s Baftas have given us something to think about. All Quiet on the Western Front is the first German-language movie version of that anti-war classic about the horror and futility of war which hasn’t been at the centre of the cultural conversation for many years. Tonight it ruled the Baftas, with seven wins including best film and best director for Edward Berger.
This is the accomplished and well-acted Netflix movie which, though it was highly regarded in the Anglo-Hollywood world, was derided in the German press as middlebrow blockbuster kitsch.
Now naysayers and yeasayers alike are gobsmacked at just how well it has done.
It’s easy to put that down to slick marketing. But it’s more than that. All Quiet on the Western Front may well be speaking to something that the rest of the evening’s Bafta winners just aren’t – with the exception of best documentary winner Navalny, about the anti-Putin dissident Alexei Navalny.
This is the one film that has awoken our unease at the unquiet eastern front: Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine which has featured some brutal old-fashioned trench warfare. The now cliched Faulkner maxim – “the past is never dead. It’s not even past” – comes to mind. This vehement and dynamically shot movie has done something that perhaps even its makers didn’t anticipate – awakened our terror of a new European war.
Elsewhere, Martin McDonagh’s exotic, comic and fantastical movie The Banshees of Inisherin – the story of two old friends falling out on a fictional Irish island around the time of the 1923 civil war – did very well, with four wins, including best supporting acting performances from Kerry Condon and Barry Keoghan. Irony connoisseurs will incidentally appreciate this very Irish creation winning best British film. It shows writer-director McDonagh’s magic touch with language and his ability to bewitch awards season voters.
Baz Luhrmann’s sparkly, fizzy extravaganza Elvis, a kind of greatest hits musical biopic about the King himself, had Bafta-voters’ hips gyrating, with four wins – including best actor for Austin Butler for his very heartfelt impression of Elvis Presley, recently endorsed by no-less an authority than his (sadly, now late) daughter, Lisa Marie.
And inevitably the most compelling acting performance of the year was recognised by Bafta: Cate Blanchett’s glorious portrayal of Lydia Tár, the autocratic orchestra conductor who approaches a creative breakthrough or nervous breakdown as she prepares for a new recording of Mahler: a monster, an emotional manipulator, a culture-war skirmisher and an all-round mad genius. It was a shame that Todd Field’s icily brilliant film couldn’t have won more – but Blanchett’s win gave a satisfying baton-flourish of acting intensity to Bafta night.
