It has become a convention for awards commentators to revert instantly to snub-complaint mode, but the almost complete no-show for Andrea Arnold’s American Honey on this year’s Bafta nomination list is a disappointment.
Apart from anything else, Arnold has the zeitgeist bragging rights. In May last year, before the US president-elect became the single global topic of appalled conversation, American Honey created a character who explicitly modelled himself on Donald Trump: Shia LaBeouf’s dangerous magazine salesman. American Honey deserved more than one nomination for outstanding British film. I am sad that Martin Scorsese’s powerful and serious film Silence was overlooked and that Jim Jarmusch’s excellent Paterson has vanished from the awards radar – though not that Clint Eastwood’s stodgy and mediocre Sully was ignored. I would have loved to see Adam Driver up on the best actor shortlist, or indeed Mark Rylance for his wonderful turn in The BFG. They deserved it more, frankly, than Viggo Mortensen for the tiringly overrated Captain Fantastic.
Well, complaints aside, 11 nominations is another sparkling result for Damien Chazelle’s delightful musical romance La La Land, which now looks set to duplicate the success enjoyed five years ago by a comparable showbusiness movie, Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist. Telegraph critic Charles Spencer famously called Nicole Kidman’s performance in David Hare’s stage play The Blue Room “pure theatrical Viagra”. I would say Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone’s performances in La La Land are pure cinematic Prozac: a boost of happiness, even when the film is sad, as it often is.
Arrival takes nine nominations, which shows that this visually ravishing sci-fi drama about Amy Adams’ linguistic professor trying to understand aliens might well make much more of an impression on Bafta voters than on the electors of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Arrival is, perhaps above all, a film about idealism, about international cooperation, about the US joining forces with foreign governments – in particular, China – to save the world. It is, moreover, a film that says aliens are not necessarily bad. When Bafta voters sit down to watch or rewatch this film in the coming weeks, there could be a progressive groundswell to boost Arrival.
Nocturnal Animals has also done well with nine nominations, and that has to be a good thing, though it is surprising that, as with the Globes, it is Aaron Taylor-Johnson and not Michael Shannon who has made it on to the best supporting actor list. I am thrilled to see Tom Ford’s brilliant and sophisticated suspense thriller surge up the rails like this. It is disturbing, transgressive film-making: the nearest thing to Hitchcockian I have seen from a new studio film in some time.
Manchester By the Sea by the increasingly well respected Kenneth Lonergan has done well with six nominations; his weighty and sombre grief drama has commanded assent. Like his earlier film Margaret, and indeed his debut You Can Count on Me, it has a kind of unflinching seriousness that is making Lonergan the Arthur Miller or the Eugene O’Neill of modern American cinema.
Garth Davis’s Lion – coming in with five nominations – is a quietly excellent film, an emotional drama and a weepie, yes, but powerfully and dynamically shot. It tells the extraordinary true story of an Indian boy who took overnight shelter in a stationary train that then took him across the country as he slept and dumped him in a city where he could not explain to anyone where he lived. He was subsequently adopted by a Tasmanian couple, and finally as an adult used Google maps to find his long-lost mother. It’s a stranger-than-fiction melodrama and rather gripping. Perhaps it won’t dominate this awards season, the way Slumdog Millionaire once did, but it’s a punchy, heartfelt film.
Ken Loach’s I, Daniel Blake is holding its own on this list with five Bafta nominations, and it would be great to see this remarkable man get the best director prize. He has shown his extraordinary gift for making cinema matter in the real world: his film has been debated in Parliament and around the UK. For others, social realism has become close to being an aesthetic mannerism: beautiful images of grim lives. But Loach has always insisted that what matters isn’t pretty pictures or even beautifully tailored imaginary existences but real life itself – and making a change. Cinema has to lead us back to the streets outside.
In some ways, and as so often in the past, the most interesting and exciting part of the Bafta nomination list is the outstanding British debut category. These are the zombie nightmare The Girl With All the Gifts, the excellent Mark Duggan documentary The Hard Stop, the ruminative and visionary Notes on Blindness, the emotional drama The Pass and the superb Iran-set supernatural chiller Under the Shadow.
Of these, I have been agnostic about The Girl With All the Gifts, but that is still a nomination list to be proud of: a very impressive selection of work from young British film-makers, perhaps especially George Amponsah’s documentary The Hard Stop, which casts a real light on the alienation and division behind the 2011 riots.
So: a lively list, certainly – and a more open field than we thought.
