BAFTAs - The results

Find out who won and who lost (and who cried) at this year's BAFTA awards ceremony.

We’d be lying if we didn’t say there was a collective grin of satisfaction in the Time Out Film section at the news that Joe Wright’s ‘Atonement’ didn’t live up to expectation at this year’s BAFTA ceremony, scooping a paltry two gongs from its 14 nominations.

It may have nabbed Best Film from such superior works as Paul Thomas Anderson’s ‘There Will Be Blood’ and the Coens' ‘No Country for Old Men’, but we can only put that down to an unseemly patriotic streak in the voting panel.

Oddly, though, it wasn’t considered to be the Best British Film: that honour went to a deserving Shane Meadows for his wonderful skinhead drama, ‘This is England’, beating ‘Control’, ‘Eastern Promises’ and ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’ to the prize.

The announcement of Best Actor came as little less of a surprise as Daniel Day-Lewis’s internally beleaguered ‘Oil man’ in ‘There Will Be Blood’ came up trumps once again, fending off stiff competition from the likes of Viggo Mortensen and George Clooney. In our opinion, he could have won it for the jowls alone.

Best Actress was a bit of a surprise, as French youngster Marion Cottilard strode to glory for her (lip-synched) approximation of Edith Piaf in ‘La Vie En Rose’, leaving bookies favourite Julie Christie with nothing whatsoever for her heartfelt turn as an Alzheimer's case in ‘Away from Her’.

In what seems to be a continuing motif of this awards season, the Coen brothers picked up the Best Director prize (which they seem to interchange with Paul Thomas Anderson), while Julian Schnabel lost out for his sterling effort in ‘The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’, but he did go on to pick up Best Foreign Language Film, so good on him for that.

But, great lovers of hyperbole as we are, we quaked at young extremist Dickie ‘the luvvie’ Attenborough, who gave a well-deserved Academy Fellowship – BAFTA’s equivalent to the US Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award – to Sir Anthony Hopkins. But in ranking dear Tony with Laurence Olivier, Charlie Chaplin and Spencer Tracy, before running some clips of ‘The World's Fastest Indian’ and ‘Amistad’, Dickie left some embarrassed faces among the BAFTA audience.

Still, it provided the evening's emotional highlight: Hopkins dedicated his thank-you speech to Dickie; Dickie flapped his little pinkie in front of his eye in a frantic effort to stave back the tears. The oldsters sure know how to stage a love-in, don't they?

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