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Admirably slick, with few major incidents or huge shocks, this year’s BAFTAs were a pretty classy affair. For the most part, the winners were thoroughly deserving and respectable choices all-around — Christopher Nolan’s pessimistic, cerebral biopic Oppenheimer took Best Film, while Nolan took Best Director, and his leading man, Cillian Murphy, snagged Best Actor.
Meanwhile, there was a lovely, touching win for Da’vine Joy Randolph as Best Supporting Actress for American indie The Holdovers, and no surprises as far as Emma Stone taking Best Actress for the audacious hilarity of Poor Things. The Zone of Interest picked up the Best British Film, Best Sound and Best Film not in the English Language – and its triumph is perhaps the most exciting of the night.
The film – directed by a Brit and co-funded with British, Polish, and German money – is an uncommercial, disturbing film about an Auschwitz commandant, and in spite of raves for it since its premiere at Cannes Film Festival last May, reaching regular moviegoing audiences might prove a bit of a difficult sell.
In a year of ‘dad’ movies the likes of Oppenheimer and ‘you won’t believe what I watched’ fare in the vein of Poor Things or How to Have Sex, a historical drama with no huge stars and little dialogue may not be quite so saleable. If The Zone of Interest has proven to be a critical darling, perhaps these BAFTA wins will keep it from slumping at the box office.
The filmmaker, Jonathan Glazer, is a British filmmaker who cut his teeth making music videos for the likes of Radiohead and remarkable ads for Levi’s and Guinness. He’s gone from strength to strength in his feature film career, beginning with the blackly funny gangster film Sexy Beast back in 2001. Taking a decade between projects, his trajectory has been deliciously unpredictable, and yet his application of elliptical visual language uniformly great.
With The Zone of Interest – a loose adaptation of a Martin Amis novel about the horrifying cognitive dissonance of a Nazi family who live directly on the cusp of the concentration camp their patriarch has helped design – Glazer reaches an apex. Onstage at the BAFTAs, he was typically camera-shy — he rarely does interviews — and simply said ‘thank you’ at the podium. His producer, James Wilson meanwhile, was more garrulous, and made explicit the link between their film and current humanitarian crises in the world today, specifically the atrocities committed in Gaza. ‘There’s obviously things going on in the world, in Gaza, that remind us starkly of selective empathy,’ he told the audience, referring to the film’s themes about the cruelty of indifference.
In spite of the general silliness of awards shows and their hoopla, the BAFTAs – and the platform they provide – do have the ability to elevate films that otherwise might go lesser-noticed. Compared to the theatricality of last year’s BAFTAs, which were meme-d into infinity due to one unfortunate musical number, things were enormously improved this year overall. Never was that more evident than in the voting body’s good sense at awarding what is clearly the finest — and most prescient — film of this year.
