2011 BAFTA Winners

Today's announcement of the 2011 BAFTA winners continued the reign of "The King's Speech" in this final stretch of the awards season. It makes sense, though. A grandly British film received the top awards winning not only Best Film but Outstanding British Film, as well, from the British Film Academy nonetheless.

When "Speech" took Outstanding British Film over the likes of "127 Hours" and "Another Year," I began thinking maybe "The Social Network" could win Best Film because I honestly didn't think "Speech" would take both. But alas, it did.

The surprise came with a Best Director win for David Fincher over Tom Hooper. Does this have any effect on the Oscar outcome, however? As much as I would like to hope so, I think Tom Hooper's DGA win still locks in his Oscar win even though he did not receive the BAFTA win.

"The King's Speech" also dominated the acting awards aside from Natalie Portman in "Black Swan" for Best Actress. Colin Firth's win for Best Actor will go on to an Oscar win, but I'm having a hard time believing Geoffrey Rush for Best Supporting Actor and Helena Bonham Carter for Best Supporting Actress are going to make an upset over the "Fighter" front-runners of Christian Bale and Melissa Leo.

"True Grit" received some love for Best Cinematography, a win I think will be repeated at the Oscars. It's about time Roger Deakins gets an Oscar after his many, many nominations.

The "Harry Potter" films received a nice, worthy honor for Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema. I mean, with a total of eight films all of rather high quality--that's an accomplishment in itself.

Full list of the 2011 BAFTA winners.

And we're just two weeks away from the 83rd Annual Academy Awards! Until then, everybody.

The British Academy Knows Best

The winners of the British Academy Film Awards were announced earlier today, and I must say they made some excellent choices, and by the looks of how many awards "The Hurt Locker" won and how many "Avatar" didn't, for the Oscars coming up in a few weeks the tight race just fell into favoring "The Hurt Locker." Sorry, "Avatar," but your awards potential went flat once you stop being number one at the box office.

Kathryn Bigelow walked away with Best Director while her film went on to win Best Film, Cinematography, Editing, Sound and Original Screenplay. And, yes, it's almost guaranteed that this is exactly what we'll be seeing come March 7th.

"Avatar" only won for Best Visual Effects and Production Design, which is another fancy way of mentioning visual effects.

A few nice twists came for Best Actress and Best Actor, which went to Carey Mulligan for "An Education" and Colin Firth for "A Single Man," respectively. Sadly, though, this probably will not be replicated with the Academy's selections.

Another surprise came with Best Film not in the English Language with "A Prophet" beating out Michael Haneke's "The White Ribbon." Will this hurt Haneke's chances at the big time win?

"Fish Tank" also beat out the likes of "An Education" in Best British Film while Duncan Jones was awarded Outstanding Debut for his direction of "Moon."

And so, while it appeared that "Avatar" had its chances, things have changed, and James Cameron's self-promotion is falling by the wayside. The clear front-runner now is "The Hurt Locker" with the only potential upset for Best Picture being Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds."

A full list of the British Film Academy Award winners can be found here.

Stay tuned for my official predictions for the Oscars soon to come!