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Baftas 2025: Conclave beats The Brutalist to best picture as Mikey Madison scoops best actress

Edward Berger and cast and crew accept the best film award for Conclave. Photograph: Stuart Wilson/BAFTA/Getty Images for BAFTA

Edward Berger and cast and crew accept the best film award for Conclave. Photograph: Stuart Wilson/BAFTA/Getty Images for BAFTA

Conclave, Edward Berger’s Vatican-set thriller starring Ralph Fiennes as a cardinal overseeing the election of a new pope, went into this year’s Bafta ceremony with a dozen nominations – the most of any contender. It ended up with four awards: for best picture, outstanding British film, adapted screenplay and editing.

Accepting the second of those, Berger – who swept the board at the awards two years ago with his remake of All Quiet on the Western Front, which won seven prizes – said: “We live in a time of a crisis of democracy. Institutions used to bringing us together are used to pull us apart. Sometimes it’s hard to keep the faith, and that’s why we make movies.”

Berger, whose film depicts a battle between liberals and traditionalists that threatens to destroy the Catholic church from within, ended his speech by quoting Leonard Cohen: “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

 

Adrien Brody accepts the leading actor award for The Brutalist. Photograph: Stuart Wilson/BAFTA/Getty Images for BAFTA
Adrien Brody accepts the leading actor award for The Brutalist. Photograph: Stuart Wilson/BAFTA/Getty Images for BAFTA

 

The Brutalist, Brady Corbet’s epic drama about a Hungarian modernist architect working in post-war America, went home with best director, leading actor, cinematography and score.

In his speech, star Adrien Brody, who recently appeared on the West End stage in The Fear of 13, thanked the British public for “embracing me and my creative endeavours”, saying “England has felt quite a lot like home lately”.

He then went on to thank his partner, designer Georgina Chapman (who is also the ex-wife of Harvey Weinstein), calling her an “angel” and adding: “If it wasn’t for you and for my wonderful parents I wouldn’t be here.”

Brody fought off competition from Timothée Chalamet, the star of Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown – which went home empty-handed – and from seven-time Bafta nominee (and one-time winner) Fiennes.

But there was a surprise in the best actress category, as Anora’s Mikey Madison – who was also beaten by David Jonsson to the rising star award on Sunday – took the prize over frontrunner Demi Moore for The Substance and much-loved Hard Truths star Marianne Jean-Baptiste.

In Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner, which also won best casting, Madison plays an exotic dancer who begins a romance with the son of a Russian oligarch. On the podium she gave a shout-out to the “sex worker community”, saying: “I see you, you deserve respect and human decency. I will always be a friend and an ally and I implore others to do the same.”

Meanwhile, Emilia Pérez, Jacques Audiard’s musical about a Mexican cartel leader who transitions while escaping the mob, took two awards (from 11 nominations) despite the ongoing fallout from offensive unearthed social media posts from its star, Karla Sofía Gascón.

 

Mikey Madison accepts the leading actress award for Anora. Photograph: Stuart Wilson/BAFTA/Getty Images for BAFTA
Mikey Madison accepts the leading actress award for Anora.Photograph: Stuart Wilson/BAFTA/Getty Images for BAFTA

 

Gascón has taken a vow of media silence since tweets surfaced three weeks ago in which she aired Islamophobic and racist views. She apologised repeatedly, including on a tearful hour-long interview on Spanish TV, but was shunned by many of her colleagues on the film, including her director, who 10 days ago said: “I haven’t spoken to her, and I don’t want to.”

Yet Audiard, whose film is up for a record-breaking 13 awards at the Oscars, appeared on Sunday to extend an olive branch to Gascón in his acceptance speech for best film not in the English language, dedicating it to the “wonderful artists” from the film who were present in the room, before adding “also you, my dear Karla Sofía, who I kiss”.

Accepting the supporting actress award for the film, Zoe Saldaña echoed Audiard, crediting Gascón in her speech, before going on to tearfully thank her mother “for being such a selfless person” and her husband: “you are God’s favourite and I hate it – you are so beautiful.”

Saldaña has won all the supporting actress awards so far handed out this season and is now considered a lock for the Oscars in a fortnight. Likewise A Real Pain’s Kieran Culkin solidified his status as the inevitable winner of the supporting actor Oscar with a Bafta win for his performance as Jesse Eisenberg’s erratic cousin on a tour of Jewish history in Poland in A Real Pain.

Eisenberg picked up the prize on Culkin’s absence – it was, he said, the fifth such award he’d collected for his co-star, “which just confirms my theory that we have a similar life but his is about 27% better than mine”.

The Succession star wasn’t present, Eisenberg said, because he wanted to be with a family member who is “quite sick” – an impulse to be with his family no matter what that, continued Eisenberg, had meant Culkin tried to drop out of A Real Pain two weeks before the shoot.

“It’s real and it’s beautiful and it’s admirable,” he said. “Kieran is one of these lovely people who’s brilliantly talented but by some random luck of the cosmos has his priorities in order.”

 

Saldaña with her award. Photograph: Isabel Infantes/Reuters
Saldaña with her award. Photograph: Isabel Infantes/Reuters

 

Eisenberg also wrote and directed the film, and appeared to be the person in the room most surprised by his victory in the original screenplay category, saying he didn’t expect to win, nor – apparently – did the person who assigned him his seat in the auditorium.

He dedicated the award to his wife, “who didn’t come because she didn’t think I’d win”. Describing himself as an “idiot”, he said his wife, who he met in 2001, had, “dragged me around the world reluctantly” and used “strict Marxist Leninist principles” to teach him that his “grief is unexceptional” compared to the rest of the world.

“Anna, you put every worthwhile thought into my head over the last 20 years and I love you so much.”

Another double winner was Aardman’s Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, which beat the likes of Inside Out 2 and The Wild Robot to the animation award, as well as proving a popular winner of the inaugural family film award.

Rich Peppiatt converted just one of his six nominations for uproarious semi-fictionalised rap biopic Kneecap into an award, for outstanding debut by a British director. In his speech, Peppiatt said he had met his wife 15 years ago to the day; they moved to Ireland a decade ago and he met the hip-hop trio who became the subject of the film within a week.

Kneecap, who hail from west Belfast and whose lyrics mix Irish and English and contain republican rhetoric are, he said “a movement. It’s about how everyone should have their language respected, their culture respected and have their homeland respected. This award is dedicated to everyone out there who’s fighting that fight.”

Meanwhile, Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story , about the late actor’s career before and after his devastating accident and the impact of it on his children, took best documentary. The film is not nominated for an Oscar, where the frontrunner is No Other Land, about the destruction of Masafer Yatta, made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective.

The evening’s most emotional speech was delivered by Warwick Davis, veteran of the Star Wars and Harry Potter films, who received the Bafta fellowship and said it was “probably the best thing that’s happened to me”. He thanked his mother and then paid tribute to his late wife, Sammy, who died almost a year before in what the actor has described as “medical negligence”.

His voice cracking, Davis thanked cinema for giving him hope, and “helping me to laugh and to love again”.

The ceremony was hosted by returning emcee David Tennant, who landed a few gentle blows on President Donald Trump – some of which were cut by the BBC in their broadcast – and who opened proceedings with a rousing version of I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles), accompanied by Hollywood stars in assorted states of familiarity with The Proclaimers

The Baftas are the final significant film awards ceremony before the Academy Awards in two weeks and many regard them as a last-gasp audition for the Oscars. There is considerable overlap between the 8,000-odd voting members of the British Academy and their 10,000 US counterparts – many of whom wait to complete their ballots, which are due on Tuesday, until they’ve seen how the Baftas unfold.

However, although last year’s choices were in almost total lockstep, with Oppenheimer dominating proceedings, the Baftas have become a less reliable Oscars bellwether since they introduced a raft of radical backstage measures in the wake of the #BaftasSoWhite controversy five years ago, when all of the 20 acting nominees were white.

Quotas at longlist stage, strict inclusivity criteria for contention in certain categories and a compulsory menu of randomised viewing for each voter has led to a striking diversity among their choices.

Author: Catherine Shoard

Source: The Guardian

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