Baftas 2024: the red carpet, the ceremony, the winners – follow it live!

If you are still inexplicably hanging around reading a liveblog of an awards ceremony that has already been over for two hours at this point, I have good news! Here’s a red carpet gallery! You will have your favourite photograph of the night. Mine is the one of Ayo Edebiri standing in what I’m pretty sure is the exact same stairwell that my six-year-old had a meltdown in just before going to see the Bluey play a couple of months ago.

I wonder what the solution is to the Baftas. The two-hour non-live approach clearly isn’t working, because anyone (by which I mean me) could just go on the BBC website and see who all the winners are before the show had even started. And doing it live won’t work either, because everyone would lose their minds about it bumping Countryfile out of the way. I’m genuinely stumped. Would it work best as a YouTube livestream? An emailed press release? Just two hours of Andy Serkis shouting the names of the winners into a bin? Honestly, I’m all out of ideas.

Extremely hot off the press, here’s Peter Bradshaw’s take on the night’s winners.

And now a final montage of everything that has happened over the last two hours, which from a television standpoint was absolutely nothing. Nothing very funny happened. Nothing very shocking. No major upsets. No Ariana DeBose, which in retrospect I am quite sad about. The whole thing just sort of sat there, flat and featureless, and then stopped. Think of all the other things we could have just done with the last two hours of our lives. The fun we could have had. The friends we could have made. But oh no. We spent it watching the Baftas. Lucky us.

Just as it is very likely to win all the Oscars. Still, it gives Emma Thomas a chance to get some of the limelight for once, which is extremely well-deserved for such a power player. She schoolmarms the entire cast and crew up to the stage, and many of them stay sitting down. And then she thanks her 16-year-old son, and that’s it. Thats the end of the awards.

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Michael J Fox is here to present best film. Not just a standing ovation, but wild, untamed applause. He’s been greeted like such a hero that he will almost certainly outshine the actual winner.

Poor Things has won a number of smaller (read: edited out) awards tonight, but this is the most high-profile. She thanks her dialect coach, and Tony McNamara for writing that line about how much she wants to punch a baby. And her mum. One more award to go! Nothing actually seems to have happened in the last two hours, does it?

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And now Idris Elba is here, to present best actress and order all the famous people to applaud themselves, which is very nice of him.

Very sour reactions from his fellow nominees Barry Keoghan (who looked like he wanted to punch him) and Bradley Cooper (who looked like he wanted to trash the whole place), but Cillian Murphy rises to the occasion nonetheless. He’s happy to play someone complex and he loves his family, plus he says ‘Oppenhomies’ to keep the internet happy.

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More Less Important Awards now. The Zone of Interest wins something. Poor Things wins something. A film about Jellyfish wins something. A film about crabs wins something. Poor Things wins something else. Poor Things wins something else. And with all this hard work booted out of the way, it’s time for the last three awards of the night.

And this is a decent result, because this was a weirdly unbalanced category, with many of the nominees having already quite visibly risen. But McKenna-Bruce is an incredibly good choice.

Morton takes the stage to a standing ovation, overwhelmed. The award is a miracle, she says. Kes changed her life, because it showed her poverty onscreen. She thanks casting directors, and Nottingham, and her family, and dedicates her award to children in care. What a beautiful, heartfelt speech.

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Samantha Morton is now being given the Bafta fellowship. Tom Cruise is doing a video about how brilliant she was in Minority Report. Susan Lynch, too, but not specifically about Minority Report. And Molly Windsor. And Daniel Mays. And then Tom Cruise again. Hope this helps.

We’re now being treated to the Less Important Awards. The Zone of Interest wins something, The Holdovers wins something. Oppenheimer wins something. Oppenheimer wins something else. 20 Days in Mariupol wins something. Oppenheimer wins something else. I don’t know whether this was a deliberate choice on the part of the BBC to chop down all the acceptance speeches that actually had something interesting to say about the world. But, hey, at least this gave us loads of room up top for all those dog puns.

The overwhelming Oscar frontrunner wins a Bafta. Nolan reveals that his brother played a snowflake at the Southbank Centre 40 years ago, and then makes a point of speaking out for nuclear disarmament. Funny AND terrifying. What a guy.

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Hugh Grant is here to present best director. He’s making up a satirical film industry poem about Oompa Loompas, and looking like he absolutely hates every second of it. Can we get him to host next year, please?

Polite applause and minor whooping greet Jonathan Glazer and James Wilson. Wilson thanks everyone, and explains what a global project this was. Glazer mumbles ‘thanks’ and leaves.

Anyway, here’s the outstanding British film award, presented by Dua Lipa. If you’re counting, that’s now two awards that have been presented by the cast of Argylle. Wow, the Baftas really bloody love Argylle, don’t they?

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