BAFTA night? Oh go on then.

Sunday night was BAFTA night and I thought I’d better write about it here, so here’s my rundown of the evening, as best I can remember it.

A misjudged opening to the event perplexes the audience by having some people dancing for a bit, and then some awards are presented by stammering fools who appear never to have spoken in front of other humans before.  People like Nicholas Hoult, who is presumably just completing his Key Stage 2 reading exercises.  Helena Bonham Carter talked for a long while, Colin Firth, who bears an odd resemblance to the BAFTA statue itself,  gave a curiously well planned and rehearsed acceptance speech for winning Best Actor (anyone would think he expected to get it), Samuel L. Jackson is the only non-white attendee on stage all night (no point to make here, just sayin’) and David Fincher couldn’t be there ‘cause he’s busy making a completely unnecessary remake that no right-minded person wants.  Or “his next gift to us”, as the thoroughly unlikeable Andrew Garfield puts it.  The most exciting part of the night came when Dominic Cooper and Rosamund Pike stepped up to present an award, coming across like a pair of giggling, babbling morons, and Pike opened the envelope and almost revealed the winner before the nominations had been read out, prompting host Jonathan Ross to jump in and stop her.  In fact the whole bumbling affair seemed to be brimming with such amateurish idiocy, Ross’ professionalism just about holding things together. 

There were however, a few moments which proved a delight to behold.  The viewing public did the right thing by voting for Tom Hardy in the Rising Star category, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo finally got academy recognition, winning in the unnecessarily wordy Best Film not in the English Language category and, much to my surprise and delight, Noomi Rapace was nominated in the best actress category.  I mean she was never gonna win, but still.  I was very pleased to see Chris Morris win Outstanding Debut by a British Director for Four Lions, which was far and away the best comedy of last year.  He wasn’t there to accept but come on, can you really see the misanthropic genius at an event like this?  I’d have been disappointed if he was.  And then there was the beautiful ending to a predictably underwhelming night when the Legend nay, the God, Sir Christopher Lee took to the stage to accept his Fellowship award.  Eloquent, humble, he spoke with a grace and humility that truly exposed the falseness and self importance of many of the younger, higher-paid ‘stars’ who graced the stage that night (Garfield, I'm looking at you).  One little complaint though: Why oh why oh why oh why did whoever put together the montage of Lee’s clips feel the need to throw in THREE clips of Count fucking Dooku?  Piss on the man’s big moment why don’t you.