Conclave and The Brutalist lead a wide-open BAFTA night in London

The 78th British Academy Film Awards brought a broad spread of winners to London’s Royal Festival Hall on February 16, 2025, with Conclave emerging as the night’s biggest winner and The Brutalist also collecting a cluster of major awards.

The supplied Los Angeles Times report says Conclave won four BAFTAs, including best film and outstanding British film, while The Brutalist matched it on the total number of trophies. The evening was notable less for one runaway victor than for a wide field of films that each managed to walk away with recognition.

That breadth made the ceremony feel like a snapshot of a competitive awards season rather than an early verdict. The source says nearly every major movie in contention received some level of honour, with Anora, Emilia Pérez, The Substance, Wicked and A Real Pain all represented in the final tally. In other words, the BAFTAs did not narrow the Oscars conversation so much as keep it open.

The ceremony was held at the Royal Festival Hall for the third year in a row, giving the event a familiar venue and a polished pace. The report says returning host David Tennant kept proceedings light, and that the show moved efficiently through a long list of awards. Minor flubs, little politics and a performance by a partially reunited Take That gave the night a mix of polish and nostalgia.

The most important takeaway, though, is that the awards were dispersed enough to keep the season unsettled. Conclave’s double victory at the top of the list confirmed the film’s strength, but the article also makes clear that the rest of the field remained alive. A broad awards spread can matter because it indicates that academy voters and precursors are not yet settled on a single front-runner.

The source excerpt also notes that Mikey Madison of Anora was among the evening’s notable acting winners, adding to the sense that the night was shaping up as a genuine ensemble of awards contenders rather than a coronation for one title. The supplied evidence does not include the full winner list, so this report stays with the confirmed highlights: Conclave, The Brutalist and a field of other major nominees sharing the spotlight.

For BAFTA, the evening reinforced its role as a major stop in the awards calendar without over-determining the Oscars race. The ceremony rewarded breadth, kept the conversation fluid and gave a strong showing to Conclave in particular. It also reminded the industry that a crowded field can produce one of the season’s most useful signals: there is still no consensus winner.

Because the ceremony spread honours across the field, it also preserved suspense for the rest of awards season. A night that handed out trophies to both prestige dramas and genre-heavy contenders rarely delivers a clean forecast for the Oscars, and that was true here as well. The BAFTAs confirmed Conclave’s strength without shutting the door on the other major contenders, which is why the evening mattered beyond the trophies themselves.