by MATT WOLF, Associated Press Writer
LONDON (AP) - Epic fantasy reigned supreme Sunday at the Orange British Academy Film Awards, where The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring won five Baftas, including best film and best director for its New Zealand filmmaker, Peter Jackson.
The same film has the most nominations - 13 - for next month's Oscars in Los Angeles, although Bafta, given by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, hasn't always been a reliable bellwether for eventual Academy Awards.
But suggesting once again that acting a disability on screen can place a performer on the awards fast track, best actor and actress went, respectively, to Russell Crowe, who plays a schizophrenic scientist in A Beautiful Mind, and Judi Dench, who plays a celebrated novelist afflicted with Alzheimer's in Iris.
"We had the most wonderful time doing (the film) contrary to what you might see on screen," a clearly moved Dench told the black tie audience at the Odeon Leicester Square cinema. Her award for playing the late Dame Iris Murdoch came as somewhat of a surprise: fellow nominee Sissy Spacek (In the Bedroom) has dominated prize ceremonies in this year's awards season to date.
And while Dench's screen husband in Iris, Jim Broadbent, lost in the best actor category to Crowe, he won a supporting actor Bafta for playing the furious showman in Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge.
In accepting the award, Broadbent paid tribute to his director, Luhrmann, whose failure to get a best director nomination at next month's Oscars has caused an industry stir. Luhrmann, said Broadbent, "is a complete visionary genius ... The world would be a duller place without Moulin Rouge."
The supporting actress prize went to Oscar front-runner Jennifer Connelly, who plays Crowe's wife in A Beautiful Mind. The lone American nominee up against four Englishwomen, Connelly said she was "really shocked and very much honored" to win - "the women in this category are truly extraordinary." (At the Oscars, she will go head to head with three Britons and an American, Marisa Tomei.)
Notwithstanding the multiple wins for The Lord of the Rings, a special audience award voted by the public included, the Baftas spread the prizes generously over numerous films. Moulin Rouge received two awards in addition to Broadbent's, while Robert Altman's England-based Gosford Park and the sleeper French success Amelie also won two.
And while it wasn't that long ago that the Baftas came after the Academy Awards in the U.S., resembling an Oscar also-ran, the shift in timing to earlier in the year has made the London awards an essential stop on the pre-Oscar circuit.
That helps explain the hefty attendance of Hollywood names, including Crowe, Connelly, and Spacek, as well as presenters Kevin Spacey, Dustin Hoffman, and Halle Berry. (Spacey was also a nominee, for The Shipping News.)
All of them had to walk a decidedly soggy red carpet to get into the theater on a rain-drenched Sunday, with Spacey from the stage going so far as to ask "what was that horribly soapy stuff" that was coming off the carpet?
The Academy Fellowship - Bafta's highest honor - went to actor- director-producer Warren Beatty. Receiving the night's sole standing ovation, Beatty told the audience that he made his first film in England in 1961 - when his wife, actress Annette Bening, was three.
Other special awards went to the filmmaking triumvirate of director James Ivory, producer Ismail Merchant, and screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who have long specialized in screen adaptations of classic British novels, The Remains of the Day and Howard's End, among them.
Vic Armstrong, a onetime stunt double from Britain who has gone on to work behind the camera as a stunt coordinator and director, received a special award, too, for his work in over 200 films.
Sunday's event was the first of five awards ceremonies presided over annually by Bafta, Britain's leading organization for film, television, and interactive entertainment.
Since 1998, the event has been sponsored by the mobile phone company, Orange, with the ceremony's name changed officially to the Orange British Academy Film Awards in 2000.
© 2002 Associated Press