The Bafta nominations list underscores the enormous award-season love being felt for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, his subversive vampire riff on America’s black experience – though it isn’t making history in quite the same way as it is at the Oscars, having 13 Bafta nominations, one behind Paul Thomas Anderson’s league-leader One Battle After Another with 14.
The awards-season prominence of Anderson’s epic antifa parable, inspired by the Thomas Pynchon novel Vineland, with Leonardo DiCaprio as a dishevelled, clueless ex-revolutionary facing off against Sean Penn’s brutal honcho Colonel Lockjaw, is happening at a queasily appropriate zeitgeist moment. The grotesquely trigger-happy immigration officers of ICE are shooting people dead on US streets and this ugly fiasco is giving us a horribly familiar-looking new figure.
ICE’s Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, achieving mayfly media stardom at the very moment that he is effectively relieved of his command in Minnesota, has a worryingly familiar buzzcut, sneer and swagger, and of course, like all Maga placemen and apparatchiks, he is submissive to the leader. He has a distinct echo of Sean Penn’s jarhead military tough-guy in One Battle After Another, who is tragicomically flattered when a masonic cabal of Wasp leaders invite him to join their club.
As for cinema’s other intersections with the headlines, there are Bafta nominations in the non-English anguage section for Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, about Iranian theocratic tyranny, and Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, about the little girl in Gaza killed by the IDF. This category also contains Brazilian film-maker Kleber Mendonça Filho’s magnificent The Secret Agent, about a dissident scientist pursued by the authorities in 70s Brazil. I can’t however agree with the saucer-eyed critical love for that other nominee in his category: Óliver Laxe’s preposterous Sirāt, with its Pythonesque explosions.
Josh Safdie’s aspartame-rush ping-pong comedy Marty Supreme, featuring Timothée Chalamet, reaffirms its awards-season prominence with 11 nominations, alongside Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s extravagant romantic fantasy about the origins of Shakespeare’s great tragedy of the Dane. This excellent film has been the subject of backlash, an annual awards-season tradition as unvarying as the state opening of parliament – this year from commentators who have declared that they do not believe Shakespeare’s Hamlet was inspired by the death of his son Hamnet. I don’t believe it either, but that isn’t the point of this speculative rhapsody of grief.
Guillermo del Toro’s supersized, super-emoted Frankenstein has eight nominations, level with Joachim Trier’s much admired cinephile family drama Sentimental Value and there are five for Yorgos Lanthimos’s absurdist eco-nightmare Bugonia with Emma Stone. They are good movies, though not each director’s best.
But what about British films? Two very good ones are getting their due at these Baftas. Kirk Jones’s I Swear has five nominations, including a best actor nod for its excellent male lead Robert Aramayo, who plays John Davidson, the activist trying to educate the world about Tourette syndrome, which he has had since his teens. It’s a generous and open-hearted movie which has struck a chord with voters – and it is good also to see a supporting actor nod for the estimable Peter Mullan, as the community centre manager who gives John a chance.
Then there is my favourite British film of the year: The Ballad of Wallis Island, which has three nominations: outstanding British film, adapted screenplay (it was expanded from an earlier short) and best supporting actress for Carey Mulligan. It is such a lovely, tender film about an eccentric lottery winner and widower, marvellously played by Tim Key, who tries reuniting an indie folk-rock duo whom his late wife loved for a private gig on his island. It is a sweet and charming work in the tradition of Local Hero or even I Know Where I’m Going!.
Perhaps Key also deserved a place in Bafta’s important “outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer” list – a category that can mean so much to the nominee. But this list does include Akinola Davies Jr’s vivid and mysterious Nigerian coming-of-age drama My Father’s Shadow and the uproarious BDSM comedy Pillion, taken from an Adam Mars-Jones novel. There is also a snub for Harris Dickinson’s outstanding film about homelessness, Urchin, which really deserved some Bafta attention.
Otherwise, the outstanding British film list has top-quality entrants including Tim Mielants’s Steve with Cillian Murphy, Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love and Philippa Lowthorpe’s deeply felt H Is for Hawk, any of which is a plausible winner. But I can’t help hoping Tim Key will be invited up to accept his Bafta for the intensely British The Ballad of Wallis Island.
• The 2026 Bafta awards ceremony is on 22 February
