A really British recoil at Bafta awards opposite Avatar

Kate Muir: At the Baftas &

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You could smell early on that there competence be a still British recoil opposite Avatar at last nights Bafta awards, an tacit tract to send James Camerons movie to Coventry for being as well big, ardent and blue.

As The Hurt Locker sucked up awards for cinematography, sound, screenplay, directing and editing, it was transparent that box bureau behemoths meant zero to the Bafta judges. They were there to prerogative quality, not quantity. To massage it in, there was Kathryn Bigelows endowment for executive of The Hurt Locker too, a moving movie about an American explosve ordering patrol in Iraq.

Aside from the Bigelow bonanza, the British patted themselves on the behind for the rest of the awards, and the tide of self-congratulation was mostly deserved. Colin Firth, the countrys heading man in A Single Man, at last had a purpose estimable of his skills his moving, happy highbrow in Tom Fords entrance film. Meanwhile Carey Mulligan, the brave woman of An Education, rught away entered the inhabitant value category. Mulligan was twenty-two when she played a 16-year-old ingnue, formed on the discourse of the surprisingly raunchy schooldays of the publisher Lynn Barber.

For unfamiliar film, the judges went for the jail thriller A Prophet rather than the philosophical punch of White Ribbon. They were mark on with their collect of Fish Tank as superb British film, since it says some-more about the pitiable state of the nation than any headlines inform could. Villainy paid for ancillary actors this year: MoNique won for her crazy mom in Precious, and in the gents dilemma Christoph Waltz won most appropriate ancillary actress for his Nazi in Inglourious Basterds.

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Duncan Jones, formerly well known as Zowie Bowie, was awarded superb entrance for his citation of Moon, an smart sci-fi thriller done for peanuts in the UK.

The glorious, self-satisfied days of 2009, when Slumdog Millionaire swept the Baftas and the Oscars and Kate Winslet collected her emotions over Best Actress awards on both sides of the Atlantic, will probably not be repeated. But the Baftas are a vigilance to the thousands of Oscar electorate to lay up and compensate courtesy to small-budget British success prior to the rite on Mar 7.