So Christopher Nolan’s huge, complex, anti-narrative epic Oppenheimer continued to deliver its payload of seriousness at the Baftas; it gained best picture, best director for Christopher Nolan and best actor for Cillian Murphy for his stunningly intuitive performance as the tortured J Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the A-bomb, with his sightless stare of horror – as if foreseeing humanity’s end – the man whose non-aligned leftist principles drove him to develop the bomb before the Nazis, the same principles which made him a pariah in red-scare America after the war.
Nolan structured his movie in such a way as to bring these concepts into alignment, moving back and forth in time. It was an artistic gamble that paid off. Robert Downey Jr also got his best supporting actor Bafta for Oppenheimer’s nemesis Lewis Strauss – although I would have preferred Paul Mescal or Robert De Niro.
And Nazi Germany was horribly also present in Jonathan Glazer’s eerie, stunning Holocaust nightmare The Zone of Interest continues its run of awards success with best British film and best film not in the English language – a remarkable combination which testifies to Glazer’s brilliant, non-parochial vision. A British producer told me Glazer is now the “Daniel Day-Lewis of directors” – he only takes on the projects he believes in; they are infrequent and always superb. The Zone of Interest is a brilliant Buñuelian nightmare of the chilling delusion, combined with fanaticism required to execute an antisemitic atrocity on a world-historic scale.
Emma Stone got her widely predicted Bafta for her quite extraordinary turn as the bizarre Bella Baxter – the Victorian fallen woman brought back from the dead in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things. Stone’s formal technique and composure is amazing considering that she can somehow make this role as sympathetic as all the others she’s played. No surprises either for the best supporting actress Bafta for Da’Vine Joy Randolph for her wonderful performance in The Holdovers as the wise, witty, emotionally wounded African-American cook at a school which is a nursery for white privilege.
The one big surprise, however, was the outstanding British debut award going not the heavily tipped How to Have Sex by Molly Manning Walker but Savanah Leaf’s Earth Mama. Well, it’s an excellent film. So Oppenheimer cleaned up – but not an absolute landslide and chances for The Zone of Interest, Poor Things and The Holdovers to cause upsets on Oscar night.
