Olivia Colman has been nominated for the Bafta for Best Actress for 'The Favourite'

The road to the Academy Awards makes its second major pit stop, after last weekend’s Golden Globes, at the British Academy Film Awards. While the Globes’s division between genres – Drama and Comedy/Musical – make it less of a sturdy indicator of what’s to expect from the Oscars, the Baftas tend to be a better indicator of what to expect.

This year, the race has come down to Bradley Cooper's A Star is Born and Alfonso Cuarón's Roma, although UK production The Favourite is in the lead with 12 nominations, thanks to its boost in both the acting and technical categories.

Here are the five biggest talking points from this year's Bafta nominations. The ceremony will take place on 10 February at the Royal Albert Hall, hosted for a second time by Joanna Lumley.

Bohemian Rhapsody loses out Best Film nomination

It appears the Queen biopic’s surprise win at the Golden Globes was something of a fluke. Although Rami Malek is still nominated in the Best Actor category for his portrayal of frontman Freddie Mercury, the film itself lost out on the top prize, with the category instead being populated by BlacKkKlansman, The Favourite, Green Book, Roma, and A Star Is Born.

The revelation has essentially reconfirmed that the Best Picture is prize is a two-horse race between Roma and A Star is Born. The latter’s lack of wins on Globes night – outside of the inevitable Best Song prize for “Shallow” – suggests Alfonso Cuarón’s Mexico-set drama has the edge, but the Baftas will be key in solidifying the real odds for Oscar night.

The 15 best films of 2018 Show all 15 1 /15 The 15 best films of 2018 The 15 best films of 2018 15. Shoplifters Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters could be the year’s most disarming film. On first glance, the clan at its centre are just like any other, but their impulsive decision to take in a missing girl begins a series of rug-pulls you wouldn’t expect from a film such as this. A complex heartbreaker, albeit one that starts out looking like the more modest family dramas Kore-eda is known for. GAGA Pictures / Thunderbird Releasing The 15 best films of 2018 14. Game Night “We knew there was a bad version of this movie that could exist,” said Game Night’s co-director John Francis Daley (the kid from Freaks and Geeks). This certainly isn’t it. Starring Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams as a competitive married couple who mistake an actual kidnapping for a particularly immersive role play game, Game Night is snappy, witty and fully committed to its brilliant, tonally unsettling conceit. Rex The 15 best films of 2018 13. Isle of Dogs Any Wes Anderson film is likely to be offbeat, fastidiously stylish and shot through with the auteur's understated drollery. Isle of Dogs is no different. A stop-motion story of abandoned canines taking on a corrupt human government, it's set in a futuristic Japan and deals with some pretty heavy themes (fascism, ethnic cleansing). Funny and full of heart. The 15 best films of 2018 12. They Shall Not Grow Old Peter Jackson’s First World War documentary is a remarkable step-forward for historical filmmaking. The Lord of the Rings director breathes new life into black and white archive footage from the Imperial War Museum, digitally restoring and smoothing the grainy source material before adding colour and sound. The result is a stunning cinematic experience that vividly brings the past into the present. By using the voices of veteran British soldiers interviewed about their experiences in the trenches, Jackson also includes a fascinating narrative that’s both gripping and informative. A wonderfully apt way to mark the centenary of the Great War. BBC/IWM The 15 best films of 2018 11. First Reformed Nobody knew if Paul Schrader still had it in him to make a film as angry or as barbed as First Reformed. There is the same raw power here as found in his earlier features about tormented loners. Cinephiles will delight in the (sometimes a little self-conscious) references to Ingmar Bergman and Andrei Tarkovsky, but you can’t help but relish the intensity and intelligence in Ethan Hawke’s performance as the tormented, guilt-ridden priest. Picturehouse Entertainment The 15 best films of 2018 10. Black Panther There were two Marvel films released this year, one of which – Avengers Infinity War – was an over-crowded, if ambitious, sequel. The other was a landmark film – not just for Marvel, but for cinema. Black Panther was fit to bursting with selling points, all combining to deliver the studio’s best film: Michael B Jordan’s standout villain, scene-stealing performances from Danai Guria and Letitia Wright, plus the direction of Creed’s Ryan Coogler who proved an inspired appointment. Wakanda forever, indeed. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures The 15 best films of 2018 9. Cold War Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War, shot in the sleekest black and white, is an effortlessly stylish and romantic drama set in a period of political convulsion. It offers everything from Polish folk music to the sultriest Birth of the Cool-style jazz. Pawlikowski includes moments of reckless hedonism alongside scenes of exile and imprisonment. Best of all, the film has a truly wonderful performance from Joanna Kulig as Zula, the free-spirited young folk singer turned femme fatale. Kino Świat The 15 best films of 2018 8. A Star Is Born There are no two ways about it: Bradley Cooper's rock star Jackson Mane inviting Ally – a small-town waitress played by Lady Gaga – onto stage to sing her song in front of thousands of his fans is movie magic. Regardless of your stance on the film's back half and pretty maudlin ending, A Star is Born is an old-fashioned success story with an intensity that brings up the hairs on the back of your neck. Clay Enos/Warner Bros/AP The 15 best films of 2018 7. The Rider Director Chloé Zhao took a gamble casting a real-life family in this modern-day western about a cowboy named Brady Blackburn (Brady Jandreau). It pays off – this an authentic portrait of contemporary rodeo life in South Dakota. From her amateur cast she somehow coaxes performances more memorable than most pros manage in their entire careers. As moving as it is bold, The Rider also offers an all-too-rare female perspective on masculinity. Sony Pictures Classics The 15 best films of 2018 6. Leave No Trace Eight years after Winter’s Bone made a star of Jennifer Lawrence, Leave No Trace – director Debra Granik’s first feature film since then – should rightly make a star of Thomasin McKenzie too. Based on the book My Abandonment by Peter Rook, Leave No Trace is virtually a two-hander between McKenzie and Ben Foster. They play a PTSD-suffering war veteran and his daughter, who live in the forests of Oregon, fending for themselves. Even when the two are arrested and placed in government housing, the film refuses to be anything other than understated and is all the more beguiling for it. AP The 15 best films of 2018 5. The Shape of Water Loneliness can sometimes feel like your soul has been chained to the bottom of the ocean, at other times it can feel like you’re speaking a language no one else understands. Guillermo del Toro beautifully illustrates both these nuances in his Oscar-winning fantasy romance, in which a mute woman (Sally Hawkins) unexpectedly falls for a strange aquatic creature (Doug Jones), the only one who sees her as she truly wants to be seen. Theirs is a love so mystical, so overwhelming, that it can only be communicated through the language of dreams. Twentieth Century Fox The 15 best films of 2018 4. Lady Bird Lady Bird will always be close to our hearts. There are times when it feels less like a film, more like a hand tracing delicately through memories, of what it felt like to grow up, to say goodbye, and to find one's own place in the universe. Greta Gerwig’s story of a teenager, played by Saoirse Ronan, desperate to escape her hometown and seek the intellectual haven of the East Coast colleges (“where the culture is”, she argues) may be specific in its layout, but it is universal in its emotions. Moviestore/REX The 15 best films of 2018 3. You Were Never Really Here Whenever Lynne Ramsey attaches her name to a film, you know to expect something special. You Were Never Really Here marks a career-high for the British auteur, who manages to condense the violent story of a former military man searching for a stolen girl into a viciously edited 90-minute thriller. Joaquin Phoenix makes for the perfect enigmatic leading man, while Jonny Greenwood’s mechanical, piercing score adds to the decidedly eerie atmosphere. Amazon Studio The 15 best films of 2018 2. Phantom Thread Should Phantom Thread really be Daniel Day-Lewis’s final film, then the actor can retire knowing that Reynolds Woodcock ranks among his greatest roles. Day-Lewis plays the egomaniacal fashion designer with a childish whimsy, but there's also a spectral quality to him that looms in every scene. Lesley Manville’s deliciously funny Cyril and Vicky Krieps’s superbly sharp Alma offer two cunning counters to Reynolds’s growing appetite for self-destruction, making for some wonderfully heated confrontations. Paul Thomas Anderson’s direction allows each character to blossom on screen, in a film that makes for a masterful study of poisonous relationships. REX The 15 best films of 2018 1. Roma Loosely based on his own childhood, Alfonso Cuaron's follow-up to the Oscar-winning Gravity is a gorgeous piece of film-making, a quiet paean to the women who raised him. It's a neorealist masterpiece, shot in 65mm black and white, and built from detailed vignettes of domestic life in early 1970s Mexico City, a time there of great social unrest. Savour every scene: the camera takes it all in, as we follow a young Mixtec woman named Cleo (wonderful newcomer Yalitza Aparicio) who looks after a well-to-do family she comes to think of as her own. It's about love, grief and resilience: it will slay you. Netflix

The Baftas make up for its past omissions

Back in 2012, the howling omission of Olivia Colman from the Baftas’ Best Actress category, for her beautiful, devastating performance in Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur, made headlines. Her Peep Show co-star David Mitchell even called the decision “ridiculous”. When Meryl Streep went on to win for her role as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, in which Colman also appeared as Thatcher’s daughter Carol, she took to the podium and dubbed her co-star “divinely gifted”.

Clearly, she knew then what the Baftas have only now cottoned onto – that Colman was destined for greatness. Thank goodness they’ve not made the same mistake twice; Colman is nominated, and will most likely win, for her role as Queen Anne in Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite.

Female directors (once again) lose out

As was the case with the Golden Globes, and as will no doubt be the case when the Oscar nominations are announced, there is not a sole woman on this year’s Best Director list. Where is Debra Granik’s nomination for Leave No Trace, her powerful, understated follow-up to Winter’s Bone? What about Marielle Heller, whose film, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, got an Adapted Screenplay nod, and earned Richard E Grant a Supporting Actor nomination.

Perhaps the most disappointing omission, though, is You Were Never Really Here director Lynne Ramsey. Given that the Baftas are usually champions of homegrown talent, it seems they’ve missed an open goal by failing to give the Scottish filmmaker her due recognition.

Cold War gives the Baftas an international flair

One of the less expected films to be honoured with several nominations here is Paweł Pawlikowski’s Cold War, a passionate love story set in the ruins of post-war Poland, as a man and a woman from vastly different backgrounds – separated by both politics and the machinations of fate – cross paths. The film earned a nomination for Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Film Not in the English Language.

Pawlikowski won the award for Best Director at last year’s Cannes Film Festival and has been selected as Poland’s entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. Whether it will earn nominations in any other categories at the Oscars is hard to guess.

The Baftas celebrate homegrown talent

Given that this year, Brits dominated even at the Golden Globes, it would have been unforgivable for the Baftas to fail to recognise homegrown talent. The Favourite’s Rachel Weisz and First Man’s Claire Foy have earned Supporting Actress nominations, and of course The Favourite’s Olivia Colman has been nominated for Best Actress.

As many surprised Golden Globes viewers were reminded earlier this week, Vice’s Christian Bale – nominated for Best Actor – is also, in fact, British, while this year’s obligatory idiosyncratic curveball is Steve Coogan’s nomination for Stan & Ollie. The fact that there’s an Outstanding British Film category, meanwhile, means that brilliant films like Beast and You Were Never Really Here, which might otherwise have been ignored, get to share a little of the spotlight too.

An Oscar favourite is snubbed

One of the more curious omissions from this year’s nominations is Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk, although it’s been recognised in both the categories for Original Music and Adapted Screenplay. The James Baldwin adaptation hasn’t quite picked up the same level of buzz as Jenkins’s previous film, Moonlight, although Regina King has so far been the favourite to win the Academy Award for Supporting Actress, so it’s unusual to see her not even make the nominations when it comes to the Baftas.

Amy Adams, Claire Foy, Emma Stone, and Rachel Weisz have all been nominated as expected, King’s place in the category has apparently been taken by Margot Robbie for her performance as Queen Elizabeth I in Mary Queen of Scots – presumably a case of a little preferential bias for a Brit production.

You can read the full nominations below.