Oppenheimer wins best film, director and actor at BAFTA awards

Atom bomb epic Oppenheimer won seven prizes — including best picture, director and actor — at the 77th British Academy Film Awards on Sunday. Gothic fantasia Poor Things took five prizes.

Christopher Nolan was named best director, and Cillian Murphy won the best actor prize for playing J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb.

Emma Stone was named best actress for Poor Things, which also won several craft and design prizes at Britain's equivalent of the Oscars.

Oppenheimer had 13 nominations but missed out on the record of nine trophies, set half a century ago by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

It won the best film race — an award presented by Canadian actor Michael J. Fox in a surprise appearance — against Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, Anatomy of a Fall and The Holdovers.

Oppenheimer also won trophies for editing, cinematography and musical score, as well as the best supporting actor prize for Robert Downey Jr.

Da'Vine Joy Randolph, who was named best supporting actress for playing a boarding school cook in The Holdovers, said she felt a "responsibility I don't take lightly" to tell the stories of underrepresented people like her character, Mary.

Oppenheimer faced stiff competition in what was widely considered a vintage year for cinema and an awards season energized by the end of actors' and writers' strikes that shut down Hollywood for months.

Holocaust drama The Zone of Interest — a British-produced film shot in Poland with a largely German cast — was named both best British film and best film not in English, a first.

Jonathan Glazer's unsettling drama takes place in a family home just outside the walls of Auschwitz.

"Walls aren't new from before or since the Holocaust, and it seems stark right now that we should care about innocent people being killed in Gaza or Yemen or Mariupol or Israel," producer James Wilson said. "Thank you for recognizing a film that asks us to think in those spaces."

Historical epic Killers of the Flower Moon had nine nominations for the awards, officially called the EE BAFTA Film Awards, but went home empty-handed.

The ceremony, hosted by Doctor Who star David Tennant — who entered wearing a kilt and sequined top while carrying a dog named Bark Ruffalo — is a glitzy, British-accented appetizer for Hollywood's Academy Awards, closely watched for hints about who might win at the Oscars on March 10.

The prize for original screenplay went to French courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall. The film about a woman on trial over the death of her husband was written by director Justine Triet and her partner, Arthur Harari.