Hype Addict BAFTA Report

The Hurt Locker was the big winner at Sunday night’s annual BAFTA awards picking up six awards including Best Picture and Best Director for Kathryn Bigelow, which doesn’t bode well for the box-office behemoth that is Avatar. James Cameron’s sci-fi epic looked set to go toe-to-toe with his ex-wife’s Iraq war film for top honours at this years Oscars, but losing out at the BAFTAs and the Golden Globes to The Hurt Locker means that it looks unlikely to pick up any more awards than simply technical ones for special effects and so forth.

My mum asked me as we were watching the BAFTAs – “If Avatar is the highest grossing film of all time – then surely it’s also the best? Why hasn’t it won best film?” But the simple fact of the matter is the quality of a film, in terms of artistic achievement, doesn’t always equate to its box-office success. Poor of Hurt Locker hardly make a dent at the box-office which is a shame, but an understandable one – people just aren’t ready for Iraq war films right now, they need some breathing space before they’ll be ready, its all still too current and fresh. Avatar, in the meantime, is a fantasy film with an incredible marketing campaign from one of the most commercially successful directors of all time, so it was always going to do well at the box-office, but unfortunately, the film aint that great. Check my review here.

So is Hurt Locker a worthy best-picture film? I saw the film at a preview sometime last year, and I was gripped from start to finish, it is a tense, smart and clever action film with some incredible performances throughout, but I remember coming out thinking – “yeah that was good, but not great”. I’d recommend you seek it out, but I stand by my thoughts that Inglourious Basterds was a better war film, infinitely more fun and hell of a lot smarter. My vote for Best Film would have been for Up, a incredibly worthy film, but the type that will NEVER win a Best Picture – an animated movie.

It was nice to see the BRITISH Academy giving the best acting gongs to Brits Colin Firth and Carey Mulligan, but don’t let that tempt you into backing them for the Oscars, methinks it was a kind of national nepotism that got them the vote. If you’re going to put money on anyone – go for Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart) and Sandra Bullock (Blind Side). The groundswell of support for both these two in the States currently seems unstoppable.

Review by Tom Butler – follow him on Twitter here.