Winners and losers at the 2025 BAFTAs
Bafta (British Academy film and television awards) award statue trophy on display (Shutterstock)
The main problem with the BAFTAs, which took place this week, is that, too often, they give too many awards to mediocre British films. In 2015 the jury gave three awards to the Stephen Hawking biopic, The Theory of Everything; in 2019 The Favourite won six awards; in 2020 1917, directed by Sam Mendes, did even better, winning seven awards; and in 2023 The Banshees of Inisherin, Martin McDonagh’s most disappointing film, won four awards. This year, it was the turn of Conclave, the adaptation of Robert Harris’s melodrama about the election of a new Pope, which also won four awards. Arguably it should have won just two: one for The Best Use of Umbrellas in a Feature Film and one for The Most Predictable Ending in a So-called Thriller.
Perhaps most striking are the excellent films which get overlooked at the BAFTAs. In 2020, for example, Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, The Joker, Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite and Scorsese’s underrated classic, The Irishman, all got nominated for Best Film and Best Direction but lost out to 1917. In 2019 Jo Jo Rabbit didn’t even get nominated for Best Film or Best Direction at the BAFTAs. This year, the superb film about Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown, won no awards at all at the BAFTAs, not even Best Actor for Timothée Chalamet as Dylan or Best Supporting Actor for Edward Norton as Pete Seeger (though both were at least nominated). Meanwhile Emilia Perez, the extraordinary musical about Mexican drug cartels, only won two awards, including one for Film Not in the English Language.
It is also interesting to note that in the last ten years, only two BAFTA Best Film winners ( Nomadland and Oppenheimer , neither of them British films) went on to win the Best Picture Oscar. None of the above-mentioned British films which won Best Film at the BAFTAs went on to win the Oscar for Best Film.
On a more positive note, it has been an interesting year for films shortlisted for the major awards. Last year, the year of Barbenheimer, the ghastly Barbie and the hugely overrated Oppenheimer swept all before them at the box office and the awards ceremonies. Barbie became the highest-grossing domestic release in Warner Bros. history. Barbie and Oppenheimer led the July 21–23 weekend to a total revenue of $310.8 million, making it the fourth-largest aggregate domestic weekend in America ever. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer won seven Academy Awards.
2024-25, by contrast, has not been a year of big blockbusters, but a year of quirky films: about corruption at a papal election, a Jewish-Hungarian modernist architect who survived the Holocaust, the brutal world of Mexican gangsters with a musical twist, two Jewish cousins going in search of their grandmother’s past in wartime Poland, and a film about how Bob Dylan found his voice as one of the great singers of the Sixties. The titles reveal the dark feel of the films: The Brutalist , A Real Pain , A Complete Unknown… It was hard to call, which was presumably why none of them swept the BAFTAs, though Conclave and The Brutalist divided up the major awards. The nearest thing to a blockbuster, Dune: Part Two , directed by Dennis Villeneuve, which grossed more than $700 million worldwide, barely got a look-in at the BAFTAs.
It has also been a year of astonishing acting performances: Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci in Conclave ; Timothée Chalamet as Dylan and Edward Norton as Pete Seeger in A Complete Unknown ; Adrien Brody, Guy Pearce and Felicity Jones in The Brutalist ; Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón and Selena Gomez as three remarkable women in Emilia Perez ; and Fernanda Torres in I’m Still Here , another dark film, this time a political thriller set in 1970s Brazil.
After Barbenheimer it feels as if the movies have grown up and discovered modern history, from the death camps and protest songs in Sixties America to violence in Mexico and Brazil. In less than a fortnight all eyes will be on the Oscars. It’s hard to believe they will overlook A Complete Unknown (seven nominations), Wicked (ten nominations), or Demi Moore (nominated for Best Actress for The Substance ). But the BAFTAs just did.
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