This is as close to an Oscar wishlist as the Baftas dare get, and a thumping result for British film. Dame Helen Mirren has achieved that rare feat. She has pipped Dame Judi to one of the biggest plums of the year. Her frumpy monarch has trounced Dench’s bedraggled lesbian teacher.

Mirren is of course The Queen so it was something of a foregone conclusion.

The serious icing is that Stephen Frears’s picture also won Best Film. He has seen off the foreigners and taken two big scalps.

Hopes that this might be Martin Scorsese’s year for his thriller, The Departed, took a bashing. So too did Alejandro Gonzalez Inarittu’s Golden Globe-winning Babel. Given the British Academy’s famous knack of reading the tea leaves correctly for the Oscars, this must be alarming news for the Americans. If Paul Greengrass repeats his Best Director win for United 93, we could witness a historic sweep.

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