Conclave Leads the BAFTA Nominations

Ralph Fiennes out front in Edward Berger’s Conclave (2024)

The fires still burning in Los Angeles have more or less put awards season on hold in the U.S. The announcement of the Oscar nominations has been postponed a second time and are now scheduled for January 23. In London, though, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts has gone ahead and rolled out its nominations for the BAFTA Film Awards to be presented on February 16.

Edward Berger’s Vatican drama Conclave leads with twelve, followed closely by Jacques Audiard’s drug cartel musical Emilia Pérez with eleven and Brady Corbet’s decades-spanning epic The Brutalist with nine. All three are nominated for Best Film along with Sean Baker’s Anora (seven nominations) and James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown (six).

One of six nominees for Leading Actor—the others are Adrien Brody (The Brutalist), Timothée Chalamet (A Complete Unknown), Colman Domingo (Sing Sing), Hugh Grant (Heretic), and Sebastian Stan (The Apprentice)—Ralph Fiennes leads a stellar cast in Conclave as Thomas Lawrence, who, as the spiritually fraught and very British dean of the College of Cardinals, reluctantly oversees a gathering of Church leaders from around the world. The pope has died, and a new one must be elected. “If palace intrigue isn’t your thing,” warns John Paul Brammer, “you might feel like you’re sitting around waiting for your meal to arrive, unaware that the rest of us are happily fasting.”

Time’s Stephanie Zacharek, for example: “Stanley Tucci wearing his red Zucchetto tilted jauntily toward the back of his head, ’30s newsboy-style? Sign me up! Ralph Fiennes indicating that the metaphorical burden on his shoulders is much, much greater than the actual weight of his scarlet capelet? I’m all over it!” Conclave is “great fun,” while at the same time, “even as it captures the allure of Vatican style—the swingy gold ecclesiastical necklaces, those soft red leather slippers—it makes a more overarching serious point: the Catholic Church must change, or risk becoming as desiccated as the bones of a long-dead saint.”

Conclave features what the Observer’s Wendy Ide calls “the most passive-aggressive curtsey in cinema history, delivered by the all-seeing Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini). This comes just after the good sister has delivered a truth bomb to the assembled cardinals, and it is so weighted with sarcasm that you wonder that her knees don’t buckle.”

Berger’s follow-up to All Quiet on the Western Front, which swept the BAFTAs two years ago, is “adapted, quite faithfully, from Robert Harris’s 2016 novel, and it combines the pulp velocity of a great airport read with the gravitas of high drama,” writes Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri. “Though he tries to be fair and balanced, Thomas is allied with Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci), a progressive candidate who wants to continue the Church’s liberalization and engagement with the world. Opposing them is Goffredo Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), a reactionary Italian who thinks the Church has been on the wrong track ever since it got rid of the Latin Mass in the 1960s.”

In the Guardian, Benjamin Lee notes that these candidates “also face competition from the more powerful American Tremblay (John Lithgow), the increasingly popular Nigerian Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), and a surprise, mysterious contender in the shape of Benitez (Carlos Diehz), who has been working in Kabul.” Conclave is “a thriller of character actors talking in rooms but Berger gives it a dynamism which makes it glide.” At North Shore Movies, Sean Burns finds it “almost hilarious how adroitly the movie cultivates a veneer of class, employing internationally respected actors to show off stiff upper lips in the service of pure pulp.”

“Vatican stories are Hollywood catnip,” observes the New York Times’s Manohla Dargis, who finds Conclave “as unpersuasive as it is entertaining.” For Dargis, it’s “easy to see the attractions of the minuscule city-state, beyond the untold masterpieces crowding it. The movies love stories about shadowy—to outsiders, at any rate—patriarchal, deeply hierarchical, unimaginably wealthy organizations with strict codes of conduct and tremendous power. That may sound a lot like a thumbnail portrait of the Mafia, but it also describes Hollywood. And what the movies especially love are lightly cynical, self-flattering, and finally myth-stoking stories that, like this one, evoke the industry itself.”

Assessing this year’s wide-open race for the BAFTAs, the Telegraph’s Robbie Collin finds that “the ongoing sheer breadth of the field suggests this might be the year for a compromise victor, and Conclave is waiting—or perhaps lurking—in the wings.” Collin is not pleased to see Nicole Kidman (Babygirl) shut out of the Leading Actress list, but he’s glad to see Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Hard Truths) in there. For more on this year’s snubs and surprises, see the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, Variety’s Alex Ritman and Ellise Shafer, and Deadline’s Andreas Wiseman.

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