Worthy winners however you roll the dice

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Award winning: Helen Mirren in The Queen

Pan's Labyrinth: named best foreign film at the Baftas

Forest Whitaker picked up the best actor award for The Last King of Scotland

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Can anyone at Bafta explain, if Stephen Frears's The Queen was accorded the signal honour of being the best film of the year in the English language, why was Kevin Macdonald's The Last King Of Scotland voted the best British film? Surely some mistake.

But, given that slightly absurd anomaly, this year's awards seemed generally fair enough, and may please the British Academy by foreshadowing the forthcoming Oscars in awarding Helen Mirren best actress for The Queen and Forest Whitaker best actor for The Last King Of Scotland. There you are, they may well be able to say, we were right.

It was a shame there was nothing for Richard Eyre and Patrick Marber's Notes On A Scandal, for which Judi Dench won the Standard's best actress gong (albeit narrowly over Mirren). But at least Bafta, if they didn't agree with our jury about United 93 as the best British film, accorded Paul Greengrass, its director, the prize for the best achievement in direction. Another slight anomaly when you come to think about it, since if he's the best director why didn't he make the best film?

Some would complain that the sins and omissions of the British Academy over the last few years have been fairly regular, especially as far as Clint Eastwood is concerned since they ignored his Oscar winner Million Dollar Baby and this year failed even to nominate his two distinguished Iwo Jima films.

But the voters pointed in exactly the right way for the foreign film award this time. Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth, which took years to finance and for which he didn't take a fee, was a good but not obvious choice over Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, Almodovar's Volver and Paul Verhoeven's Black Book, the three other most favoured candidates.

The film was worthy of Bunuel as far as its extraordinary mixture of realism and the surreal was concerned. And you can't give it a much better compliment than that.

Peter Morgan, who has had the year of his life as a writer for both stage and screen, may be a little surprised at winning the adapted screenplay award with Jeremy Brock for The Last King Of Scotland rather than for his original work on The Queen.

But few can be displeased that the excellent American independent comedy Little Miss Sunshine nabbed its two awards, for Michael Arndt's original screenplay and for Alan Arkin's terrific performance as the cokesniffing grandfather of the film's delightfully eccentric family.

But, whatever you think of the individual results, the truth is that this year the nominations were often so even in quality that you could have rolled a dice and got some worthy winners.

 

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