Oppenheimer takes top Baftas – but Poor Things and Zone of Interest also triumph

Cillian Murphy accepts the leading actor award for Oppenheimer. Photograph: Kate Green/Bafta/Getty Images for Bafta

Christopher Nolan, one of the most celebrated and successful British film-makers of the century, has finally won his first Bafta award, as his biopic of the man behind the atomic bomb took best picture and best director.

Nolan, 54, has previously been nominated for eight Baftas but – bar an honorary award in 2010 – was yet to win one. On Sunday night, Oppenheimer, his Imax epic starring Cillian Murphy as nuclear physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, dominated the British film industry’s most prestigious prizes, taking seven Baftas, including leading actor for Cillian Murphy and supporting actor for Robert Downey Jr.

Nolan said he felt his film – which concludes with Oppenheimer voicing his fear that the atomic bomb has hastened the end of the world, rather than helped save it – ends with “a dramatically necessary note of despair”. But, he added, many people and organisations had successfully helped further nuclear disarmament, with a 90% reduction since 1967.

That, said Nolan, has now “gone the wrong way. But it’s important to acknowledge their work, which shows the necessary and potential of efforts for peace.” The victories further cement Oppenheimer’s position as frontrunner at next month’s Oscars, where the film is also in the running for 13 awards.

However, the evening’s awards were shared more widely than many expected. Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos’s steampunk fantasy starring Emma Stone as a woman with the brain of a child, took five awards, including leading actress.

Concluding her speech, Stone thanked her mother, “because she’s the best person in the world. Without her, none of this would exist, including my life. So thank you, mom!”

Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest took three awards, for best sound, outstanding British film – and best film not in the English language. A radical drama about the domestic utopia created by Hedwig and Rudolph Höss in their home just outside the wall of Auschwitz, where he was camp commander, the film was made by Film4 and a British production team, with a German cast and shot entirely in Poland.

On stage, the film’s producer James Wilson highlighted the film’s message about the perils of selective empathy. A friend had recently written to him, he said, explaining that they “couldn’t stop thinking about the walls we construct in our lives which we choose not to look behind”.

Wilson continued: “Those walls aren’t new from before or during or since the Holocaust, and it seems stark right now that we should care about innocent people being killed in Gaza or Yemen in the same way think about innocent people killed in Mariupol or in Israel. Thank you for recognising a film that asks you to think in those spaces.”

The words were warmly greeted in the room. Earlier, a Stop the War Coalition poster bearing the message “Gaza: Stop the Massacre” was borne on the red carpet by Ken Loach and his fellow The Old Oak film-makers.

Meanwhile, 20 Days in Mariupol, a harrowing look at the first three weeks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine through the eyes of the local reporters for the Associated Press, won best documentary.

Its weary-sounding director, Mstyslav Chernov, highlighted the recent fall of Avdiivka into Russian hands, saying: “Mariupol is a symbol of everything that happens, of struggle, of faith. Thank for empowering our voice, and let’s keep fighting.”

Barbie, Oppenheimer’s running mate – and rival – in last summer’s extraordinary box office phenomenon, left the awards empty-handed, as did Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Celine Song’s Past Lives and Bradley Cooper’s Maestro.

There was some disappointment for The Holdovers, Alexander Payne’s 1970s-set comedy, which missed out on leading actor for Paul Giamatti, but did take the casting award for Susan Shopmaker and supporting actress for Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who made a rousing and emotional acceptance speech.

Randolph has won every award in the category this season, and her victory in London, beating homegrown stars such as Rosamund Pike (for Saltburn) and Emily Blunt (for Oppenheimer) cements her position as the surest Oscar bet in recent memory.

There was a surprise in the best debut category, as former GB volleyball player Savanah Leaf won for Earth Mama over the much-fancied Molly Manning Walker, writer-director of How to Have Sex. The star of that film, Mia McKenna-Bruce, took the rising star award, which is voted for by the public.

The Bafta fellowship went to Samantha Morton, who dedicated her award to “every child in care today, or who has been in care, or who is suffering, or who didn’t survive”.

The ceremony was hosted by David Tennant, who played it safe with a script whose jabs were mostly confined to friends such as Michael Sheen. In attendance was Bafta president Prince William, sitting next to Cate Blanchett, in the absence of his wife, Kate. A standing ovation met Michael J Fox, the subject of Bafta-nominated documentary Still, who presented the best picture award.

This year’s Oscars take place in three weeks, on 10 March. Although there is considerable overlap between the almost 8,000 Bafta voters and the 10,000 Oscar voters, last year’s winners diverged dramatically from the Academy Awards, when German-language war film All Quiet on the Western Front swept the former, while madcap comedy Everything Everywhere All At Once dominated the latter.

Cate Blanchett and Austin Butler won leading actor awards at the Baftas, for Tar and Elvis, while The Whale’s Brendan Fraser and Everything Everywhere All At Once’s Yeoh took the equivalent Oscars.