Atonement, the film adaptation of Ian McEwan's best-selling novel, was named best film at the star-studded BAFTAs, the UK's showpiece movie awards, on Sunday.
Daniel Day-Lewis was named best actor for his role in There Will Be Blood, and French actress Marion Cotillard was the surprise winner of the best actress award for La Vie En Rose, in which she played singer Edith Piaf.
The British Academy Film and Television Arts awards took on increased importance this year, after a writers' strike in the US reduced the Golden Globes, traditionally the second-biggest film awards after the Oscars, to a mere news conference last month.
Overall, though Atonement, a romantic drama about life and love in World War II, had been nominated in 14 categories, it managed to win only two, with the other coming in the production design category.
Discussing whether or not the night had been a disappointment for the cast and crew of Atonement, co-producer Eric Fellner said: "When you are nominated 14 times and see 12 losses it's a great relief. Being nominated is an extraordinary thing. I'm incredibly happy to have 14 nominations and two wins."
While Day-Lewis was the favorite to win the best actor gong, Cotillard's victory meant Julie Christie, for Away From Her, and Keira Knightley, for Atonement, left empty-handed. The former was favorite to win.
Her award comes after she won a Golden Globe for the same performance, and the 32-year-old has also been nominated for an Oscar.
La Vie En Rose finished with four awards, the most of any film at the BAFTAs - it also won in the music, costume design and makeup categories, with Cotillard having to play Piaf as a 19-year-old and, eventually, as a frail woman who died aged 47.
She later said that her award victory was "totally surreal" and added: "I'm absolutely shocked, totally shocked. I'm so happy ... I don't know what Edith Piaf would think about this. I hope she would be happy."
Sunday's victory for Day-Lewis, 50, gives him his second BAFTA, having won one in 1990, and follows similar successes at the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors' Guild Awards, and his portrayal of oil baron Daniel Plainview has also earned him an Oscar nomination.
On Sunday evening, he beat out, among others, James McAvoy for Atonement and George Clooney for Michael Clayton.
"It didn't occur to me when I was doing the film that it would be a film that a lot of people would want to see," Day-Lewis said backstage after the ceremony.
Meanwhile, Joel and Ethan Coen won in the best director category for their dark thriller No Country for Old Men at the ceremony at central London's Royal Opera House.
Transformers star Shia LaBeouf won the Orange rising star award, and Oscar-winning actor Anthony Hopkins was presented with the BAFTA fellowship.
Tilda Swinton was named best supporting actress for Michael Clayton while Javier Bardem won in the Best Supporting Actor category for No Country for Old Men.
Though the BAFTAs normally play second fiddle to the Golden Globes, the writers' strike in the US gave the awards - officially the Orange British Academy Film Awards but popularly known as BAFTAs - extra importance.
The unions representing striking Hollywood screenwriters said on Saturday, however, that they had agreed to a deal to settle their three-month-old dispute, and could be back at work within days if the deal meets with union members' approval.
The strike severely disrupted Hollywood's annual awards season, leading to the cancellation of the Golden Globes awards after actors vowed to boycott the event, and casting a shadow over preparations for the Feb. 24 Oscars.
It is barely 10am and the queue outside Onigiri Bongo already stretches around the block. Some of the 30 or so early-bird diners sit on stools, sipping green tea and poring over laminated menus. Further back it is standing-room only. “It’s always like this,” says Yumiko Ukon, who has run this modest rice ball shop and restaurant in the Otsuka neighbourhood of Tokyo for almost half a century. “But we never run out of rice,” she adds, seated in her office near a wall clock in the shape of a rice ball with a bite taken out. Bongo, opened in 1960 by
Common sense is not that common: a recent study from the University of Pennsylvania concludes the concept is “somewhat illusory.” Researchers collected statements from various sources that had been described as “common sense” and put them to test subjects. The mixed bag of results suggested there was “little evidence that more than a small fraction of beliefs is common to more than a small fraction of people.” It’s no surprise that there are few universally shared notions of what stands to reason. People took a horse worming drug to cure COVID! They think low-traffic neighborhoods are a communist plot and call
The sprawling port city of Kaohsiung seldom wins plaudits for its beauty or architectural history. That said, like any other metropolis of its size, it does have a number of strange or striking buildings. This article describes a few such curiosities, all but one of which I stumbled across by accident. BOMBPROOF HANGARS Just north of Kaohsiung International Airport, hidden among houses and small apartment buildings that look as though they were built between 15 and 30 years ago, are two mysterious bunker-like structures that date from the airport’s establishment as a Japanese base during World War II. Each is just about
Taiwan, once relegated to the backwaters of international news media and viewed as a subset topic of “greater China,” is now a hot topic. Words associated with Taiwan include “invasion,” “contingency” and, on the more cheerful side, “semiconductors” and “tourism.” It is worth noting that while Taiwanese companies play important roles in the semiconductor industry, there is no such thing as a “Taiwan semiconductor” or a “Taiwan chip.” If crucial suppliers are included, the supply chain is in the thousands and spans the globe. Both of the variants of the so-called “silicon shield” are pure fantasy. There are four primary drivers