Critical Week: The stars came out

Sunday was the 76th Bafta Film Awards, with a new venue at the Royal Festival Hall and a new host in the charmingly British Richard E Grant (with contributions from a lively but distracting Allison Hammond). It was a star-packed event, with a glittering audience of nominees and special guests, which allowed for the usual offbeat presenting duos (Eugene Levy with Cynthia Erivo?). Among the winners, the biggest surprise was Austin Butler being named Best Actor, which bodes well for Oscar night. And Barry Keoghan was a popular surprise winner for Supporting Actor, although perhaps Ke Huy Quan has the edge for Oscar. And then there was All Quiet on the Western Front with its unprecedented seven huge wins, including film and director over Tár and Everything Everywhere All at Once, top nominees that had to settle for just one prize each. But the issue of inclusivity still needs to be discussed, when awards like these (and the London Critics' Circle) opt for overwhelmingly white winners even with a superbly diverse set of nominees.

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As for the movies I've been watching, the biggest one was a very late press screening of Elizabeth Banks' crazed action thriller Cocaine Bear, a riotously grisly throwback to '80s nature-gone-wild mayhem movies. It took me awhile to catch up with Hirokazu Kore-eda's Broker, another wonderfully humane drama that sympathises with people on the moral fringes. How to Blow Up a Pipeline is an entertaining caper adventure about a group of young people taking on Big Oil. The twisty antics kind of overshadow the serious themes, but it's good fun. From Argentina, Wandering Heart is a superbly naturalistic drama about a man trying to pull himself together after a breakup. And the Oscar-nominated doc A House Made of Splinters highlights a situation in war-torn Ukraine with a hugely resonant kick.

This coming week I'll be watching Michael B Jordan's Creed III, Lily James in What's Love Got to Do With It, Michael Shannon in A Little White Lie, the Aussie drama Lonesome and the French drama Love According to Dalva, plus a couple of theatre shows.

Critical Week: Bafta celebrates Boyhood

It was the biggest night in the UK film calendar, as the British Academy Film Awards were handed out at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden. Richard Linklater's Boyhood emerged as the big winner, taking Film, Director and Supporting Actress. Pictured above is the movie's attending cast and crew, plus Tom Cruise, who presented Best Film. Alas, Linklater was absent due to the Directors Guild Awards the previous night in Los Angeles.

The other big winner was Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, which took home five Baftas: Original Screenplay, Score, Production Design, Costumes and Make-up & Hair. Other triple winners were The Theory of Everything (British Film, Actor, Adapted Screenplay) and Whiplash (Supporting Actor, Editing and Sound). Pictured at the right is Best Actress winner Julianne Moore with presenters Henry Cavill and Chris Evans, and Best Actor winner Eddie Redmayne with the person he played in the film, Stephen Hawking.

Bafta is always a strange one, because the BBC refuses to broadcast it live, waiting a few hours and chopping it down to two hours to show later at night - meaning there are several "awards presented earlier" bits in the closing credits. This butchers the ceremony's flow and momentum, leaving it feeling oddly dry and dull. It doesn't help that Stephen Fry has been hosting just a bit too long - he's still timely and pithy, but offers nothing remotely new from year to year.

As for other awards, Bafta usually gets to present at least one worthy winner that Oscar ignored, and Sunday night's was The Lego Movie, which won Animated Feature. It was also great to see Ida win Foreign-Language Film and Pride's writer and producer win the Outstanding Debut award. Finally, it was no surprise that Jack O'Connell won the Rising Star Award - he's had an awesome year with Starred Up, '71, Unbroken and even 300: Rise of an Empire.

Meanwhile, Screenings this past week were all rather low-key titles, including the strikingly involving transgender comedy-drama Boy Meets Girl, the enjoyable British indie alien invasion adventure Robot Overlords, the astonishing Ukrainian deaf-gang drama The Tribe and the eye-opening narrative documentary The Man Who Saved the World. I also got a chance to see Blade Runner: The Final Cut on a big screen for the first time in advance of its re-release in a couple of months.

This coming week's collection will include the event movie Fifty Shades of Grey, Will Smith in Focus, Chris Hemsworth in Blackhat, Francois Ozon's The New Girlfriend, the Kiwi drama The Dark Horse and the acclaimed doc Dreamcatcher.

Critical Week: Bafta with beards! On ice!

The British Academy Film Awards - better known as the Baftas - were held last night at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, a gorgeously glamorous venue even on a grisly night in which the driving rain turned to sleet and then snow. A-listers bravely made their way up the icy red carpet under umbrellas and heavy coats, with the odd instance of a starlet visibly shivering in the cold while trying to show some flesh. And as predicted, it was Argo's night in the spotlight, as Ben Affleck won two of his three nominations - for Director and Film (produced with George Clooney and Grant Heslov, above). He missed out on Actor to, unsurprisingly, Daniel Day-Lewis. Bafta voters also showed their love for Django Unchained, giving Original Screenplay to Quentin Tarantino and Supporting Actor to Christoph Waltz, essentially making this category a two-horse race at the Oscars in two weeks between Waltz and SAG winner Tommy Lee Jones.

Anne Hathaway continued her romp through the Supporting Actress category this awards season. And in a not-so-surprising upset Emmanuelle Riva won Actress, considerably boosting her chances of taking the Oscar. The nicest surprise was David O Russell winning Adapted Screenplay and delivering a genuinely unexpected thank-you. In the British categories, Skyfall was the predicted winner of British Film; British-produced docs The Imposter and Searching for Sugar Man both won awards; despite the fact that no one saw Killer Joe, Juno Temple won the public vote for Rising Star; and the two awards for venerable Brits went to filmmaker Alan Parker (Bafta Fellowship) and Film Four veteran Tessa Ross (Outstanding Contribution). Pictured at right (clockwise from top-left): Hathaway, Waltz, Temple, Tarantino, Mendes and Broccoli, and Day-Lewis.

Speaking of venerable, Stephen Fry was simply terrific as the ceremony's host, with his smart, hilarious banter, most of which probably went over the heads of the Americans in the audience, for a variety of reasons. Mixing absurd silliness with pithy commentary on recent headlines, he kept things moving impeccably as always, eliciting a kiss-to-camera this year from Jennifer Lawrence and flirting shamelessly with a slightly perplexed Jeremy Irvine. The Best Presenter-Pairing Award goes to Bradley Cooper and Affleck - there were audible "woofs" from the audience as they strode manfully tot he podium. The Best Acceptance Speech Award goes to Waltz, for a warm, snappy thank you, with Day-Lewis as a witty runner-up.

All the winners...

• Film: Argo - Grant Heslov, Ben Affleck, George Clooney
• Film Not in the English Language: Amour - Michael Haneke, Margaret Ménégoz
• Documentary: Searching for Sugar Man - Malik Bendjelloul, Simon Chinn
• Outstanding British Film: Skyfall - Sam Mendes, Michael G Wilson, Barbara Broccoli, Neal Purvis, Robert Wade, John Logan
• Animated Film: Brave - Mark Andrews, Brenda Chapman
• Director: Ben Affleck - Argo
• Original Screenplay: Django Unchained - Quentin Tarantino
• Adapted Screenplay: Silver Linings Playbook - David O Russell
• Leading Actress: Emmanuelle Riva - Amour
• Leading Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis - Lincoln
• Supporting Actress: Anne Hathaway - Les Misérables
• Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz - Django Unchained
• Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer: Bart Layton, Dimitri Doganis - The Imposter
• Rising Star: Juno Temple
• Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema: Tessa Ross
• Bafta Fellowship: Sir Alan Parker
• Cinematography: Life of Pi - Claudio Miranda
• Original Film Music: Skyfall - Thomas Newman
• Production Design: Les Misérables - Eve Stewart, Anna Lynch-Robinson
• Costume Design: Anna Karenina - Jacqueline Durran
• Editing: Argo - William Goldenberg
• Make-Up And Hair: Les Misérables - Lisa Westcott
• Sound: Les Misérables - Simon Hayes, Andy Nelson, Mark Paterson, Jonathan Allen, Lee Walpole, John Warhurst
• Visual Effects: Life of Pi - Bill Westenhofer, Guillaume Rocheron, Erik-Jan De Boer, Donald R Elliott
• Short Film: Swimmer - Lynne Ramsay, Peter Carlton, Diarmid Scrimshaw
• Short Animation: The Making of Longbird - Will Anderson, Ainslie Henderson

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CRITICAL WEEK:

Meanwhile, films screened for London critics this past week included the gonzo guilty pleasure Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, a violent fairy tale starring Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton (who both presented awards at the Baftas). Elijah Wood stars in the first-person remake of the grisly serial killer horror Maniac; Danny Dyer stars in the dire film adaptation of the British farce Run for Your Wife; Romain Duris stars in the charming, slightly too-quirky French romantic-comedy Populaire; and Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda won the week with his drop-dead gorgeous childhood adventure I Wish.

This coming week's titles include late screenings of Bruce Willis in A Good Day to Die Hard and Alice Englert in the teen-franchise launcher Beautiful Creatures. We also have James McAvoy in a film of Irvine Welsh's Filth, Viggo Mortensen in Everybody Has a Plan, Brady Corbet in Simon Killer, Joss Whedon's take on Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, Mathieu Kassovitz's thriller Rebellion, the New York gang drama Gimme the Loot, the Oscar-nominated Israeli doc The Gatekeepers, and the Snoop Dogg/Snoop Lion doc Reincarnated.