The Favourite picked up a whopping seven BAFTA awards at the Royal Albert Hall event last night, including best actress for Olivia Colman in her starring role as Queen Anne, and best supporting actress for her co-star Rachel Weisz, who plays her favourite, Sarah Churchill.
How the latter award win will be handled by Emma Stone, who plays Sarah’s cousin Abigail, who arrives at the Queen’s court ready to do some serious social climbing, and was also nominated in the category, is yet to be seen. Emma wasn't at the event to exact her revenge, perhaps she will wait until the Oscars instead, where the pair are again nominated for best supporting actress.
Or it might very well be that the whole point of The Favourite, the reason it's cleaning up at awards season as well as whoever had to clean up that orange-pelting scene or the cake-puking scene had to clean up is that while the characters loathed each other, all the actors and actresses ended up adoring one another. Like the inverse of what happened with Sex and the City.
There's not enough time in the world to regale you with the minutiae of everything we loved about The Favourite. We can, however, tell you why each award was won.
1. Best actress
Olivia Colman won this because she plays the stroppy-needy-tragic Queen Anne so well you simply believe she is her. At turns depressed, jealous and fearful, she takes great delight in her riches, racing lobsters then eating them for fun, feeding her pet rabbits mini carrots, andindulges in some slap and tickle with both Abigail and Sarah (Colman has boasted that 'snogging Rachel Weisz is like you’ve won the lottery'), using both to get the human connection she so craves after losing 17 children.
2. Best supporting actress
Rachel Weisz nabbed this award for a performance that includes throttling the Queen, delivering archly mean lines to Abigail, and giving the most beautiful speech from behind a door. Fiercely committed to her Queen, Sarah will stop at nothing to retain her favour, and you get the feeling it comes from a place of genuine love and adoration.
3. Outstanding British Film
Filmed on location in Hatfield House and Hampton Court Palace, starring two British actresses (Colman and Weisz), the Britishness of this film is, outside of obvious funding streams, tricky to place. After all, it's directed by a Greek, Yorgos Lanthimos. Willing to show the monarchy as human, with all the effluent that involves, the film exists outside of the tradition of British respect for the royalty, and has a distinctly punk attitude to rules and limitations put upon what women are meant to do in films, and what British women are meant to do in films. And what British women playing royal court members are meant to do in films. But, then again what’s more British than that punk sentiment?
4. Best make up and hair
What’s so remarkable about this accolade is it’s the men who won it, larking about underneath toppling curly wigs and caked in Restoration-era white make-up, powder-pink blush and beauty marks. Apart from a bruisingly funny scene showing what happens when Queen Anne tries a new look and ends up looking like ‘a badger’, and a party scene where Abigail begins to show her commitment to hedonism, the women were relatively subdued.
5. Best costume design
Sandy Powell worked primarily on a black and white colour scheme, to let the glorious, garish sets shine through in this deliberately anachronistic film. Using denims from Slough’s finest charity shops for the workers’ clothes and black cloth from Brixton’s fabric shops for the more regal designs, making up surreal royal regalia worked in the Oscar-winning designer’s favour.
6. Best production design
A lot of The Favourite seems totally un-real. Many shots are done with a fish-eye lens, which makes the film seem totally, well, on film, not IRL. There is also disconcerting music, great big chapter titles, and surreal scenes of e.g. fruit being pelleted at a naked clown. What tethers it to the real world, and makes it believable - beyond the fantastic acting - is the design. So there’s real food! There’s real mud! There is real-looking vomit and plush bed linen and wheelchairs the likes of which you can imagine a queen of that time would have been carted around in!
7. Best original screenplay
Full of cutting put-downs, scathing back-and-forths and witticisms, The Favourite’s screenplay, with all of its lesbian sex and outright single entendre meant it took a whopping 20 years to be turned into a film. Writer of the original screenplay, Deborah Davis, who accepted the award with Tony McNamara (with whom she collaborated with on further drafts) pointed this out in her acceptance speech. Ever-pithy, she said: ‘Thank you for my first ever BAFTA for my first ever screenplay’.