Both Renée Zellweger and Joaquin Phoenix win big at the 2020 BAFTAs, picking up the two best actor awards for Judy and Joker respectively. While neither film dominated the night, despite 11 nominations for Joker, they both impressed for the individual performance of the lead actors, which is essentially how the films are designed to work.
Joker went on to win just three awards, which is a good way shy of its nominations tally with Best Original Score for Hildur Gudnadottir and Best Casting for Shayna Markowitz. The award for Leading Actress for Renée Zelweger is the only BAFTA that went to Judy Garland biopic Judy, so it really did all come down to the individual performances of the leads.
The biggest winner on the night was 1917, which won seven BAFTAs from ten nominations, including Best Film, Outstanding British Film and Best Director for Sam Mendes (Spectre). It also picked up Cinematography for the brilliant Roger Deakins, Best Special Visual Effects and Sound, but it was far from a clean sweep for the World War 1 action drama.
Not only did the Best Actor awards go to Joker and Judy, but the Supporting Actor and Actress went elsewhere too. The former went to Brad Pitt for Once Upon A Time In Hollywood and the latter went to Laura Dern for the Netflix drama Marriage Story, despite the fact that neither film picked up any other BAFTA 2020 wins.
2020 BAFTA speeches highlight the need for change
The ceremony itself was also notable for yet more race and gender inequality as there were no actors of colour in any of the categories and no female directors in the mix either. Speeches from both Rebel Wilson and Joker star Joaquin Phoenix highlighted these issues pretty well, although one more seriously than the other. You can see both of the speeches in the videos below and we can only hope that they start to hit home over the next year for both the people at BAFTA and the film industry overall.
The concepts of systemic racism and sexism in the movie industry are all too easily overlooked. When you consider the fact that it must be so embedded to result in zero actors of colour out of 18 possible nominations and zero women out of 5 opportunities in the Best Director category, there’s clearly a long old road to walk for many many people.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that the wrong films or actors were chosen, although the powers that be at BAFTA will inevitably be reviewing that. It’s more that the opportunities across the entire industry must be so stacked against equality that it has little chance of taking root and prospering in a way that is meaningful.
You can check out more details for the Joker DVD, Blu-ray and digital release at www.tuppencemagazine.co.uk/joker-dvd-release-date-uk, or see the official webpages on the Warner Bros. site at www.warnerbros.com/movies/joker.
Animated oddities
The Animated Film category always seems like a bit of an oddity and that was the case in 2020 with Netflix Christmas flick Klaus picking up the award. It beat out Frozen 2 and Toy Story 4, which is a slightly random surprise, despite its strong reviews. There are only 4 nominations in the category too, which could be boosted to include at least one more film, but then maybe if we’re being brutal 2019 just wasn’t a great year for animated films.
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