Bafta 2006

Britain's attempt to rival the importance of the Oscars has done well in recent years to bring glamour and fun to an event that can be a lot of stuffed shirts being terribly embarrassed to acknowledge how good they are. They seem to have the balance right now - glamour, yes, but a sense of dignity that is often lost on our American cousins. Steven Fry returned for another year to bring wit, intelligence and no little naughtiness to the affair, and thank God. Some of his introductions are quite ingenious, diluting a lot of the dry over importance of the old school. Of course, the whole thing is still terribly British, but it is an award even the hardest of Hollywood stalwarts want to win these days (with the exception of absentee winner Reese Witherspoon perhaps). It proved that Seymour Hoffman needed a bigger shelf, that Rachel Weisz's time had indeed come, that Thandie Newton was one to be watched at the Oscars and that Brokeback Mountain wasn't the only film out there. Despite that, I was delighted to see Jake Gyllenhaal pick up some kudos, and indeed Ang Lee, who gave a lovely speech thanking Britain for their support of his work over the years, citing The Ice Storm ( one of my all time favourites) as a film that everyone else but Bafta ignored. Speech of the night though was left till the end when Lord David Puttnam, introduced by an increasingly doddery Lord Attenbrough, received the fellowship award... Having being retired from film production for almost a decade because of cynicism to the way the industry was going, he made a point of thanking George Clooney for proving him wrong - indeed who would have thought it, but many would agree! He then went on to make every single person in the house weep by recounting one of his favourite scenes in cinema history, surprisingly the last scene from The Sixth Sense, and related it to his dead father being proud of him. A deserved standing ovation for the man who brought us, among other things, Chariots of Fire, The Killing Fields and The Mission - deserved because it was a genuine moment from a genuine man with nothing to gain by showboating: wonderful. One of the best nights of backslapping in recent memory. Kx