The BAFTAs 2015. Again.

Film For all my bitching and moaning and thinking and praying, with the end of the BAFTAs in actuality and the start of the edited highlights only overlapping by about twenty minutes, I was only spoilt via social media for three categories, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Best Picture, but I didn't care. Because it was Boyhood, because it was for once the film I wanted to win everything, it just meant I could have a big cheer early in the evening and another one later.

Criticise Stephen Fry all you want but other than Norton I can't think of many other presenters who quite fit. He's generally loved by the people in the hall and while its true we'd love to have someone as edgy as Tina Fey and Amy Poehler presenting doing that sort of material, Mail related fear means the BBC wouldn't dare. Even when Ross presented it briefly, the results were hardly the Comedy Awards. No Garai moments this year either.

No Rock and Roll Fun has a perfect review of the Kasabian incident. These opening musical numbers are becoming increasingly problematic; Bafta lacks a Best Song category but for some reason they give us a track anyway and usually from someone with little or no connection to the film industry and in a ceremony which is already being edited down to fit the timeslot.  Surely the time would be best spent giving out an otherwise squeezed award like Best Animation?

There were less of those this year, I think.  Best Film Not In The English Language turned up in the main body for the first time in a while, so Mark Kermode wasn't called upon to incongruously hand it out.  I was pleased Ida won.  I've not seen it but I've otherwise been a fan of Pawel Pawlikowski especially since he was the reporter who was being cued in during the autocue balls up on The Late Show which appeared on the A-Z of TV Hell ("Pawel Pawlikowski reporting... err...")

This was the Tweet of the night:



Having ignored the shorts, my guesses ended up with 8/16 thanks to a late surge in the squeezed categories at the end with all The Grand Budapest Hotel wins (which was my default choice in categories where Boyhood wasn't nominated or I hadn't seen any of the other films).  Which is better than usual.  About the only category I was cheesed about was Gugu Mbatha-Raw.  Jack O'Connell seems like a talented chap but a win by Gugu would have been more symbolic.

Nevertheless, Baftas garlanded Boyhood in all the right ways and that we now live in a world were Patricia Arquette is a BAFTA winner is all to the good.  Hers was an attenuated speech about how some careers seem to become golden in retrospect, fitting with the theme of the film which to an extent is all about the careers of the actors across those twelve years, ebbing and flowing in between that other single endeavour.

Then there was Ellar Coltrane's speech.  Of all the actors in the piece. he's arguably the one who was most vulnerable since he was the one put in that central position for all those years and in whom the whole project rested.  If he had decided not to continue the film would have ended, yet he carried on even when he wasn't happy and if there'd been justice he'd have been nominated in the best actor categories at the major rather than minor awards and won a few of them.

That's that for another year.  Will they finally be live next year?  Don't know.  One approach could be to make sure the show itself ends before the BBC show starts so that everything can effectively reset on the Twitters (as happened last night to a degree when some news feeds effectively pretended they were reporting on the wins during the tv broadcast even though they were technically repeating themselves).  We'll see.
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