Awards Season 2018: BAFTA Film Awards Nominations

It was an early start to the day for some, as this year's BAFTA Film Awards nominees were announced at 7:30am this morning (9th January) by Natalie Dormer and Letitia Wright.

Here's a selection of the nominees:

BEST FILM

Call Me By Your Name

Darkest Hour

Dunkirk

The Shape Of Water

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

OUTSTANDING BRITISH FILM

Darkest Hour

The Death Of Stalin

God's Own Country

Lady Macbeth

Paddington 2

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

LEADING ACTOR

Jamie Bell (Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool)

Timothee Chalamet (Call Me By Your Name)

Daniel Day-Lewis (Phantom Thread)

Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out)

Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour)

LEADING ACTRESS

Annette Bening (Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool)

Sally Hawkins (The Shape Of Water)

Frances McDormand (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri)

Margot Robbie (I, Tonya)

Saoirse Ronan (Lady Bird)

SUPPORTING ACTOR

Willem Dafoe (The Florida Project)

Hugh Grant (Paddington 2)

Woody Harrelson (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri)

Christopher Plummer (All The Money In The World)

Sam Rockwell (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Allison Janney (I, Tonya)

Lesley Manville (Phantom Thread)

Laurie Metcalf (Lady Bird)

Kristin Scott Thomas (Darkest Hour)

Octavia Spencer (The Shape Of Water)

DIRECTOR

Guillermo del Toro (The Shape Of Water)

Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name)

Martin McDonagh (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri)

Christopher Nolan (Dunkirk)

Denis Villeneuve (Blade Runner 2049)

A full list of nominees can be found here.

The Shape Of Water leads the field with 12 nominations, whilst Darkest Hour and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri have 9 apiece.

Whilst there's a lot of the usual names been mentioned here, there's always a British slant to the BAFTAs which means it can often buck the trends of the American-based awards bodies; that's why the nods for Lesley Manville, Hugh Grant, Kristin Scott Thomas and Jamie Bell might seem surprising at first (but actually aren't that radical; well, maybe Hugh Grant's is). There's also the issue of eligibility due to release- for example, two of the nominees for Film Not In The English Language (Elle and The Salesman) were nominated for many awards last year but not the BAFTA. It may be that films like Mudbound and Downsizing (who have had several nominations throughout this awards season) weren't shown in time to make them eligible. Besides, always good to shake things up a bit, and I'm glad to see Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool get some awards love as it was a superb film. 


This year's EE Rising Star nominees are Timothee Chalamet, Daniel Kaluuya, Josh O'Connor, Florence Pugh and Tessa Thompson. This award is voted on by the general public and you can vote for your favourite here.

The BAFTA Film Awards will be handed out on Sunday 18th February at the Royal Albert Hall, with Joanna Lumley taking up the mantle of host (as Stephen Fry has stepped down after 12 years in the role). 

Congratulations to all nominees!




Thursday (11th January) sees the announcement of the Directors' Guild Awards (DGA) and also the Critics' Choice Awards ceremony, so there'll be a post about that on Friday (12th January). 

Review: Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool (UK Cert 15)

Actress Gloria Grahame was a big star in the 1940s and 1950s. Appearing in such films as It's A Wonderful Life, The Big Heat, and Oklahoma! and sharing the screen with the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Joan Crawford, and Charlton Heston, she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in The Bad And The Beautiful. Later in life, she focused more on stage work. Whilst in London in the late 1970s, she met a young actor called Peter Turner and the two quickly fell into a relationship. When Gloria became ill, she felt that she could recover in Liverpool and stayed with Peter and his parents. This amazing stranger-than-fiction true story formed the basis of Peter's memoir, Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool, which has now been adapted for film. 

Directed by Paul McGuigan (Lucky Number Slevin, Push) from a screenplay by Matt Greenhalgh, the film stars Annette Bening as Gloria and Jamie Bell as Peter. 

Bening is superb as Grahame. A fesity, flirty, firecracker of a woman, unashamed of her past and embracing her future. She isn't a Norma Desmond figure, living for past glories. She's a working actress, doing what she can. It's a livewire performance and one of Bening's best. The film uses footage from Grahame's films and publicity photos, but refreshingly they don't do the usual trick of superimposing Bening-as-Grahame in the original's place (as the film focuses on Grahame towards the end of her life, it would seem strange for them to do that).There's a beautiful poignancy to the final scenes, as Gloria bows to the inevitable, and she and Peter share a heart-rending scene on the stage of the Liverpool Playhouse. A truly wonderful central performance. 

Matching her in intensity and brio is Bell as her younger lover. A working-class lad from Liverpool, he's made his way as an actor (although with no great success). He meets Gloria in London and eventually gets swept up in her world; one that's a thousand miles away from what he's used to. I love that he's rough round the edges (but is never treated as Gloria's 'bit of rough'). Also good is that Peter never exploits Gloria's fame or reputation to further himself; he genuinely seems to love her for who she is (indeed, he seems shocked when the barman tells him that Gloria once won an Oscar). It's a strong performance by Bell who has firmly put Billy Elliot behind him- although it's lovely to see him dancing round Gloria's room at the start. 

Supporting roles are well filled, with Julie Walters as reliably brilliant as ever as Peter's mum Bella. What could have been a stereotypical Scouse ma, fretting over ever detail, is elevated by Walters' wonderfully nuanced performance. Kenneth Cranham is great as Peter's dad Joe, whilst Stephen Graham rounds out the family unit nicely as Peter's brother. Vanessa Redgrave gets a great scene as Gloria's mother whilst Frances Barber is nicely venomous as Gloria's catty sister Joy, who casually lays out over dinner that Gloria's fourth husband was her stepson from her second marriage (which caused a real-life scandal in the 1960s).

The script is fairly solid although there are several instances that are mentioned that it would have been nice to see dramatised- the shopping trip to get Gloria's 'ruby red slippers', or seeing Gloria in the Turners' kitchen making a bacon butty, for example. Also, the script is non-linear- it starts with Gloria's collapse in Leicester as she prepares to go on stage in The Glass Menagerie and then bounces around both time and location- from London to Los Angeles, New York to Liverpool- to tell the story of Gloria and Peter's relationship. In itself this isn't necessarily an issue but sometimes the bridging between flashbacks is a bit clunky- opening a door in the present to find you're in the past. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. 

Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool should appeal to fans of classic cinema as it tells a compelling and (I'm assuming) not widely known story. A fine ensemble cast give some of the strongest performances I've seen on film this year. 

Rating: 4 out of 5

Tez