Acting Oscars Are Still Up In the Air After BAFTA Upsets

This is the scoring recap for Week 19 of Vulture’s Movies Fantasy League. It’s too late to join the league this year, but you can still follow along by visiting the league hub and subscribing to the weekly newsletter.

The British Academy Film Awards, more commonly known as the BAFTAs, were handed out on Sunday and featured the latest instance of the acting awards not going the way we were expecting. While Hamnet’s Jessie Buckley continues to steamroll in Best Actress, the other three acting categories broke from the previous precursors. After Jacob Elordi (Frankenstein) took the Critics Choice Award and Stellan Skarsgard (Sentimental Value) the Golden Globe, Best Supporting Actor at the BAFTAs went to Sean Penn for his chicken-walking Colonel Lockjaw in One Battle After Another. Meanwhile, after Amy Madigan (Weapons) won at Critics Choice and Teyana Taylor (One Battle After Another) won the Globe, Sinners’s Wunmi Mosaku took Best Supporting Actress. In the night’s most surprising upset, Robert Aramayo from the British indie I Swear — which doesn’t get released in the States until April and was thus ineligible for MFL consideration — won Best Actor. With Oscar front-runner Timothée Chalamet nominated but not winning, Best Actor at the Oscars looks a lot less certain than it did a few days ago.

Otherwise, the usual dynamic of this awards season prevailed: One Battle After Another won the most awards, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay for Paul Thomas Anderson, Penn for Supporting Actor, plus awards for the film’s cinematography and editing. All told, OBAA picked up another 180 points to pad its already sizable lead as the MFL’s leading point-earner. For its part, Sinners picked up a few awards of its own. In addition to Mosaku’s win, Ryan Coogler won for Original Screenplay, and Ludwig Göransson prevailed in Best Original Score, good for 90 MFL points. And while it’s been my feeling that Sinners is going to clean up in the Oscars’ craft categories, the BAFTAs went repeatedly for Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, which won for its production design, costumes, and hair/makeup, good for 60 MFL points.

Hamnet took home the Best British Film prize in addition to Buckley’s win, Sentimental Value took Best Film Not in the English Language, and Zootopia 2 took advantage of an unnominated KPop Demon Hunters to win Best Animated Film. Somewhat expectedly, the vroom-vrooms of F1 were deemed the year’s best achievement in sound, and the pyromaniac Na’vi of Avatar: Fire and Ash helped that film win Best Visual Effects.

Full list of BAFTA points:

One Battle After Another: 180
Sinners: 90
Frankenstein: 60
Hamnet: 55
Avatar: Fire and Ash: 20
F1: 20
Sentimental Value: 20
Zootopia 2: 20

Incremental gains are slowing to a trickle when it comes to box-office points. Zootopia 2 and Avatar: Fire and Ash have long since blown beyond the top echelon of bonus points, so at this point they’re just adding points in the low single figures. Marty Supreme and Hamnet continue to inch closer to their next bonus thresholds but are not likely to get there without a boost of some kind. The most notable developments of the weekend were Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie picking up another million dollars and thus another MFL point. And director Harry Lighton’s dom-sub dramedy romance Pillion finally crossed the $1 million threshold, earning itself a point.

The full list of box-office performers this weekend (amounts are cumulative domestic earnings to date):

Zootopia 2: $423 million
Avatar: Fire and Ash: $399m
The Housemaid: $126m
Marty Supreme: $95m
Hamnet: $23m
Sentimental Value: $5m
Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie: $2m
Pillion: $1m

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We’re less than three weeks away from the Oscars, with only a few more precursors left at which to pick up points. This coming weekend will see the Producers Guild hand out its Best Film award on Saturday night, followed by the Actor Awards (formerly the SAG Awards) on Sunday. All eyes will be on Sinners at both events, since the PGA tends to favor box-office successes (one area where Sinners has a definite advantage over One Battle After Another), and a win in the Best Cast category at SAG could signal real potential for Sinners to win the Oscar.

Producers Guild Awards: February 28
Actor Awards: March 1
Writers Guild Awards: March 8
98th Academy Awards: March 15

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