London, 19 Feb

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.

Christopher Nolan won his first Best Director BAFTA for Oppenheimer, and 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. 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, costume design, and makeup and hair.

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 won trophies for editing, cinematography and musical score, as well as the Best Supporting Actor prize for Robert Downey Jr.

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 was 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 recognising a film that asks us to think in those spaces.

Ukraine war documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, produced by The Associated Press and PBS Frontline, won the prize for best documentary. This is not about us, said filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov, who captured the harrowing reality of life in the besieged city with an AP team. This is about Ukraine, about the people of Mariupol.

Chernov said the story of the city and its fall into Russian occupation is a symbol of struggle and a symbol of faith. Thank you for empowering our voice and let's just keep fighting.

The awards ceremony, hosted by Doctor Who star David Tennant  who entered wearing a kilt and sequined top while carrying a dog named Bark Ruffalo  was a glitzy, British-accented appetizer for Hollywood's Academy Awards, closely watched for hints about who might win at the Oscars on 10 March. The prize for original screenplay went to French courtroom drama Anatomy of a Fall." The film about a woman on trial over the death of her husband was written by director Justine Triet and her partner, Arthur Harari.