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Ammon News - Atom bomb epic "Oppenheimer" won seven prizes, including best picture, director and actor, at the 77th British Academy Film Awards on Sunday, cementing its front-runner status for the Oscars next month.

Gothic fantasia "Poor Things" took five prizes and Holocaust drama "The Zone of Interest" won three.

British-born filmmaker Christopher Nolan won his first best director BAFTA for "Oppenheimer," and Irish performer Cillian Murphy won the best actor prize for playing physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb.

Murphy said he was grateful to play such a "colossally knotty, complex character."

Nolan noted that nuclear weapons are "a nihilistic subject and the film inevitably reflects that," telling the movie's backers: "Thank you for taking on something dark."

Emma Stone was named best actress for playing the wild and spirited Bella Baxter in "Poor Things," a steampunk-style visual extravaganza that won prizes for visual effects, production design, makeup and hair and costume design.

"Oppenheimer" had a field-leading 13 nominations, but missed out on the record of nine trophies, set in 1971 by "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid."

It won the best film race against "Poor Things," "Killers of the Flower Moon," "Anatomy of a Fall" and "The Holdovers." "Oppenheimer" also scooped trophies for editing, cinematography and musical score, as well as the best supporting actor prize for Robert Downey Jr., who played Atomic Energy Commission head Lewis Strauss.

Da'Vine Joy Randolph was named best supporting actress for playing a boarding school cook in "The Holdovers" and said she felt a "responsibility I don't take lightly" to tell the stories of underrepresented people like her character Mary.

"Oppenheimer" faced stiff competition in what's widely considered a vintage year for cinema and an awards season energized by the end of actors' and writers' strikes that shut down Hollywood for months.

"The Zone of Interest," a British-produced film shot in Poland with a largely German cast, was named both best British film and best film not in English — a first — and also took the prize for its sound, which has been described as the real star of the film.

Jonathan Glazer's unsettling drama takes place in a family home just outside the walls of the Auschwitz death camp, whose horrors are heard and hinted at, rather than seen.

"Walls aren't new from before or since the Holocaust, and it seems stark right now that we should care about innocent people being killed in Gaza or Yemen or Mariupol or Israel," producer James Wilson said. "Thank you for recognizing a film that asks us to think in those spaces."

CBS