BAFTA House in London has just been the venue for the announcement of this year's BAFTA nominations and - if we're being honest - there are few surprises with The King's Speech leading the way on 14 nominations.
Colin Firth heads up the list of nominees in what has surely become - after his gracious win at the Golden Globes - the Best Performance by Colin Firth in a Film About A King category - poor Jeff Bridges, James Franco, Javier Bardem and Jesse Eisenberg barely stand a chance. Similarly The Social Network and The King's Speech seem shoe-ins for best adapted and original screenplay respectively.
Other categories however are going to be less easy to call with critics and audiences split between Natalie Portman (Black Swan) and Annette Bening (The Kids Are All Right) for best actress... while they were both winners at the Globes we think the presence of Hailee Steinfeld for her wonderfully assured and comically nuanced performance in True Grit might put a real cat amongst the melodramatic pigeons. Meanwhile BAFTA might decide to fly the flag and give Geoffrey Rush lovely performance as Firth's speech therapist a bit of a push despite everyone else in the world agreeing that all best supporting actor prizes this year should go to Christian Bale's similarly charismatic though edgier performance in The Fighter.
Though all of that can be worked out with logic we're going to find it very difficult to call the Best Film category... for a start the whole thing's messed up by BAFTA insisting on having an Outstanding British Film category and while the only film duplicated in the two is The King's Speech the doubling could create a situation whereby 127 Hours - for example - beats Tom Hooper's film as Best Brit film while The King's Speech wins Best Film overall... we don't think that's going to happen, but the fact that it could makes nothing here a safe bet.
Similarly Best Director is going to be hard to judge with Danny Boyle, Christopher Nolan and Tom Hooper risking a split of British vote to allow David Fincher (surely a cert by now for the Oscar) a clear run at the golden mask.
And what about Inception we hear you asking... well, it's nominated in nine categories and though it might sweep up a few technical awards we think it's going to be edged out in most of them and runs a real risk of going home - if you don't count the close to billion bucks it made at the box office - empty handed.
The only way to find out what's going to happen is by tuning in on February 13th... meanwhile check out the full list of nominees over here.
Source: Screenrush
