BAFTAs

Three Billboards took home five BAFTA awards on Sunday night.

The nominees for the British version of the Academy Awards are in, and they further establish ‘Three Billboards’ as our Oscar frontrunner.

Cheerio, and cor blimey! The BAFTAs, Britain’s most prestigious film awards program, took place last night in London and recognized the finest achievements of the year on the silver screen. And in 2016, regardless of which side of the Atlantic your awards show happens to transpiring, that means an evening-long salute to awards juggernaut La La Land. With a little less than two weeks to go before Oscar night, Damien Chazelle’s crowd-pleasing musical picked up a few more accolades to pad its portfolio and brighten its chances for the big dance.

Like it, love it or hate it, La La Land is continuing its major sweep of awards season, unsurprisingly. After winning a record-breaking seven Golden Globes on Sunday night, the Damien Chazelle romance musical has come out on top of the 2017 British Academy of Film and Television Awards with 11 nominations. The surprising bits of the BAFTA announcement though, were the few very nominations given to its main competitors.

This year’s awards season has been a special treat due to the absence of a clear-cut frontrunner, with The Big Short, Spotlight, The Revenant, and Mad Max: Fury Road all in relatively close competition — up until very recently, at least. While early nominations were split between these four heavy-hitting movies, The Revenant has broken out in recent weeks as the various awards-giving bodies have had their ceremonies. Artistic intention be damned, the sheer technical bravado of Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu’s western may be enough to push it through to a big victory on Oscar night, if last night’s showing at the BAFTAs is any example.

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts polished their monocles, twiddled the ends of their impeccably-groomed mustaches, cleared the straggling bits of crumpet from their throats, and announced the nominees for the BAFTA Film Awards late last night. Though the awards program does have a highlight category specifically designating the year’s most Outstanding British Film, this English critical body still favored Hollywood productions in its slate of nominees. Many of the films that have emerged as this season’s usual suspects made their expected appearances — why hello, ‘Carol’ and ‘The Big Short’ and ‘The Revenant’ and ‘Spotlight’ and ‘Bridge of Spies’ — but the unveiling of the BAFTA hopefuls was not without its surprises, both pleasant and un-pleasant.