The German-language Netflix film has 14 nominations, and great resonance with the Ukraine war, but I suspect a good number of the gongs will go elsewhere
The Baftas have delivered a very unusual outlier to what we all thought was the accepted general drift of this year’s award season. It’s certainly a departure from English-speaking Hollywood, though perhaps a tribute to a very shrewd marketing campaign from a certain streaming service. At all events, the Golden Globes may have saluted Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, but not the voters of the British Academy who have largely overlooked that film in favour of a resoundingly announced love for the new version of the German anti-war classic All Quiet on the Western Front, based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque, way ahead of all the other films with a whopping 14 nominations.
What a triumph for everyone, including it must be acknowledged its distributor Netflix which kept doggedly putting its prestige product under Bafta voters’ noses. They are proud of this film. Rightly so. It is the first German-language adaptation of the book and is very good: excellently acted and staged, with severity and moral seriousness, though without any great original interpretative slant. Some might be surprised at quite how this film seemed to have leapfrogged everyone else. It could well be because we are now all so grimly aware of the unquiet eastern front; the brutal and continuing war in Ukraine may have directed Bafta’s collective unconscious to this brutal subject.
