'Brokeback' rules the BAFTAs

Director Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain lassoed four prizes--Best Film, Best director, Best Adapted Screenplay (for Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana), and Best Supporting Actor (for Jake Gyllenhaal)--to top the Orange British Academy Film Awards on Sunday. Philip Seymour Hoffman was named Best Actor for Capote, and Reese Witherspoon won as Best Actress for Walk the Line. Thandie Newton won as Best Supporting Actress in Crash.

James Schamus, who produced Brokeback with cowriter Ossana, noted that it is a "gay shepherd movie" and not a gay cowboy movie. He thanked Focus Features and his "chief shepherd Ang Lee" for putting the movie together, and described producing Brokeback as "the greatest professional part of my life." Lee told the gathered press that after The Hulk he had been very stressed. He also thanked the film's backers for giving a Taiwanese-American director the opportunity to make such a film.

Gyllenhaal described backstage just how "amazed" he was to secure the award. "This film has made a social impression on me, and it has already had a political impact," Gyllenhaal said.

Nick Park's Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit secured the Alexander Korda Award for Outstanding British Film of the Year, marking the first time an animated film won the prize. In the event's other exclusively British category, the Carl Foreman award for Special Achievement by a Director, Producer, or Writer in a First Feature went to director Joe Wright for Pride and Prejudice. Wright pointedly said it was an oversight by the British Academy that his film's female lead, Keira Knightley, had been overlooked for a nomination.

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The winner of this year's award for Non-English Language Movie was De Battre Mon Coeur S'est Arrete (The Beat That My Heart Skipped), directed by Jacques Audiard. Richard Attenborough presented retired Oscar-winning film producer David Puttnam (Chariots of Fire, The Killing Fields, The Mission) with the academy's highest accolade, the Academy Fellowship. Puttnam had the auditorium in tears with a tribute to his father and said backstage that he would be unlikely to return to film but "would like to revisit documentaries," where he started.

The Orange British Academy Film Awards, hosted for the sixth time by openly gay humorist Stephen Fry, were telecast live Sunday night on BBC One. Orange is a cellular phone company. (Stuart Kemp, Reuters)