Page 15 - FOYER_Cannes 2001

DIARY
BERLIN • LOSANGELES • MILAN • FOYER • CANNES • TOKYO • LONDON PAGE13
Though no single film dominated this year’s Orange British Academy Film Awards, the big winner at the Odeon Leicester Square in London’s West End was the evening’s smallest and youngest contender, Billy Elliot’s 14-year-old Jamie Bell.
The Teesider, now
back at school concen-
trating on GCSEs follow-
ing his remarkable film
debut in the home-grown
box office hit, beat off
four of cinema’s adult finest – Michael Douglas, Russell Crowe, Tom Hanks and Geoffrey Rush – for the coveted Best Actor award.
It was just the kind of headline- worthy ‘scoop’ needed to underscore BAFTA’s bold decision to move the awards ahead of the Oscars – and a sweet success for Bell following his sur- prising failure to secure even a nomina- tion at the US event held a full month later in sunny Hollywood.
Billy Elliot earned Julie Walters a Best Supporting Actress award – “human rights were violated,” she quipped about the onerous choreogra- phy - and also won The Alexander Korda Award for Outstanding British Film Of The Year.
Best Film went to Gladiator, another offering with a strong British contribution either side of the cam- era, and Ridley Scott’s Roman epic added another three BAFTAs making
it the event’s joint win- ner with Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon which also net- ted a quartet of masks. Lee repeated last year’s double by Pedro Almodovar of Best Director and Best Foreign Language Film for his martial arts magic masterpiece.
Gladiator also pipped Billy Elliot as well as What Lies Beneath, Chicken Run, Mission: Impossible 2, Stuart Little, Charlie’s
Angels, X-Men, Dinosaur and The Grinch to the Orange Audience Award which attracted a total of over 100,000 popular people votes.
Apart from young Jamie Bell, who might also have been reasonably thought to be vying, alongside his nominated director Stephen Daldry and screenwriter Lee Hall, for The Carl Foreman Award for Outstanding Newcomer in British Film, the night’s only other major shock was that the
THEORANGEBRITISH ACADEMYFILMAWARDS
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Above: Goldie Hawn and Jamie Bell with his Actor In A Leading Role Award