Anthony Hopkins and Frances McDormand’s Bafta no-shows ended the night on a sour note

And the Bafta goes to… none of the actors who bothered to Zoom in. It can’t have been a happy moment for the producers of this year’s broadcast when both the lead acting winners, Anthony Hopkins and Frances McDormand, announced they were going to be no-shows. 

It certainly didn’t give the ceremony much of a climax. Dolled up in their living rooms, the other nominated stars sat there suppressing their disappointment and glumly clapping, while some airbrushed agency photo of a much-garlanded screen legend took the prize.

Hopkins and McDormand are, in fact, wonderful – career-re-definingly so – in their respective films, The Father and Nomadland, but no matter how justified any awards coup, it takes the shine off things when you sense they weren’t interested or somehow had better things to be doing. 

In Hopkins’s case, at least according to his Twitter feed, this appeared to be going on a ramble in the Welsh countryside; McDormand was altogether AWOL. Accepting on their behalf, the directors of their films, Florian Zeller and Chloé Zhao, read out brief statements that could hardly have seemed more hasty or texted-just-in-case.

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