Colin Farrell misses out on Bafta but still a favourite for Oscars
LONDON, ENGLAND - FEBRUARY 19: Colin Farrell attends the EE BAFTA Film Awards 2023 at The Royal Festival Hall on February 19, 2023 in London, England. (Photo by Dominic Lipinski/Getty Images)
Colin Farrell could well be forgiven for feeling as baffled as his character Pádraic Súilleabháin following the Baftas.
After picking up many awards this season, Farrell missed out on one of the top awards of the night — Best Actor — to star Austin Butler.
Now awards-season observers and fans of the Irish actor will be paying close attention to next weekend’s Screen Actors Guild awards, where both men feature among the nominees.
Never the type of person to take his success for granted, Farrell’s omission nevertheless came as a big surprise. A well-respected and liked actor, he has been almost universally praised for his role as a man whose life is upended when his friend (fellow awards-season candidate Brendan Gleeson) suddenly ends their friendship.
is one of four fine performances from Farrell over the past year. He shone in a supporting role in , was great in the touching indie sci-fi , and as a real-life cave rescuer in Ron Howard’s powerful .
Ever since winning Best Actor at the Venice film festival for last September, Farrell has been among the favourites to have a history-making run all the way to the Oscars, notching up numerous end-of-year awards and leading a green charge in a proud year for Irish film.
But it hasn’t all gone his way, and Sunday night’s Baftas, while a setback for the Dubliner, is by no means the end of his Oscars run. Farrell remains in serious contention to win his first-ever Oscar on March 12.
What hasn’t changed is the fact that this year’s Best Actor Oscar is an incredibly close call between Farrell, Butler, and actor Brendan Fraser, with the greatest respect to Bill Nighy ( ) and our own Paul Mescal ( ).
All five men have been both Bafta- and Oscars-nominated for their powerful onscreen work this year. Fraser won the Critics Choice award in the US, while both Butler and Farrell took the top prize at the Golden Globes, which has two lead acting categories. Butler, so good as Presley in Baz Luhrman’s biopic, was a popular winner on Baftas night.
What is certain following the Baftas is the sheer level of uncertainty on the Oscars path in what has been the most wide-open and unpredictable Oscars in many, many years.
All through this year’s awards run, different guilds and bodies have gone for different candidates across many categories — even the Best Picture race is far more tricky to call than in more predictable and humdrum years.
It makes for a much more exciting season for movie fans, but an increasingly jittery one for Farrell and our fellow Irish nominees, amounting to a history-making 14 nominations this year.
Little wonder, then, that the PR and social media campaigns are in full swing, with those involved doing their utmost to showcase their work to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). The organisation’s membership has grown by a third in recent years as it aims for greater diversity, and now number almost 10,000 voters across many acting, filmmaking, and craft categories.
Next weekend’s Screen Actors Guild awards will provide another tantalising piece of the awards-season puzzle. With 130,000 members who are performers, the SAGs comprise of the largest single voting body on the US awards circuit.
Farrell and Butler are both among the nominees — if the Irishman were to win Lead Actor here, it would tip a delicate balance back in his favour.
This year’s Oscars has been compared to the Irish movie version of Italia 90, with so many of our storytellers heading to Hollywood to compete on the world stage. For a small country, it has been a remarkable achievement.
For one of our best-loved actors and public figures, a historic Oscar win might well come right down to a nail-biting 'penalty shootout' as the nation holds its breath.
