The Brutalist was the night’s almost-joint winner, with prizes for director Brady Corbet and Adrien Brody, while A Real Pain and Kneecap provided heartening victories
• Conclave beats The Brutalist to best picture
• Full list of winners
• Adrien Brody and Mikey Madison among the winners – in pictures
• Best quotes of the night
Whatever else happened at this year’s Bafta ceremony, it provided us with a very exciting star-is-born moment. Mikey Madison broke ahead of a densely packed crowd of best-actress contenders (in which only the hapless Karla Sofía Gascón was really lagging behind) to win the Bafta for her wonderfully smart, funny, charismatic and vulnerable performance in Sean Baker’s Anora, playing a New York table dancer who gets a Vegas wedding to a Russian oligarch’s son. Her final closeup scene in that film is a thrilling masterclass in complexity. I admit that I myself had been rooting for Marianne Jean-Baptiste for her performance in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths, but who could possibly begrudge Madison her night of triumph?
Otherwise, the night’s big winner was Edward Berger’s superbly classy and sleek Vatican conspiracy drama Conclave, based on the Robert Harris bestseller; it was level pegging in terms of numbers with The Brutalist, but carried off the evening’s top prize. Conclave is the movie whose blue-chip excellence all round made it a firm favourite with Bafta voters, who were thrilled by Ralph Fiennes’s lead performance as the troubled cardinal; they were diverted by its visual flourishes, amused by its intelligent but approachable dialogue on religious issues and vastly entertained by its twist ending. Strict anti-spoiler rules dictate that we can’t fully discuss how this film in fact is part of a contemporary debate exhaustively analysed elsewhere.
