‘Oppenheimer’ sweeps the BAFTAs with 7 awards including best film

Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster movie about the development of the atomic bomb, swept the board at the EE British Academy Film Awards, commonly known as the BAFTAs, in London on Sunday.

The movie won seven awards at Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars, including best film, best director for Nolan and best leading actor for Cillian Murphy for his portrayal of the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer.

It beat four other nominees to the best film prize, including Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’ take on a Frankenstein story and The Holdovers, Alexander Payne’s comedy about a boarding school teacher stuck looking after a student over the holidays. It also beat Killers of the Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese’s 3-1/2-hour epic about the Osage murders of the 1920s, and “Anatomy of a Fall,” Justine Triet’s multilingual courtroom drama about a woman accused of murdering her husband.

At the ceremony at London’s Royal Festival Hall, Nolan, who grew up in London, seemed a little overwhelmed by all the accolades. Accepting the best director prize, he called the award “an incredible honor” then reminisced about his parents dragging him to the festival hall, a major classical music venue as a boy. In fact, he said, his younger brother, now also a TV and filmmaker, had beaten him to the hall’s stage “by about 40 years” because he once took part in a performance of The Nutcracker.

Accepting the best actor prize, Murphy also seemed shocked. Holy moly! he said, before thanking Nolan, and producer Emma Thomas, Nolan’s wife, for allowing him to play the “colossally, knotty, complex character” of Oppenheimer. Nolan and Thomas saw “something in me that I probably didn’t see in myself,” Murphy added.

Among the other awards for Oppenheimer were best supporting actor for Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, the Oppenheimer nemesis who insisted he would only lead the Atomic Energy Commission if Oppenheimer were removed from his consulting role; best original score; best editing; and best cinematography.

Those wins come just weeks after the movie captured five of the main awards at this year’s Golden Globes, and will be seen by many as further boosting its chances for next month’s Oscars, especially because the BAFTA and Oscar voting bodies overlap.

Even with Oppenheimer dominating the event, several other movies did well. “Poor Things” took five prizes including the best leading actress award for Emma Stone.