The 52nd BAFTA Film Awards, given by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts on 11 April 1999, honoured the best in film for 1998.
Shakespeare in Love won the award for Best Film (also won the Academy Award for Best Picture) and Best Editing. Elizabeth was voted Best British Film. Both Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett won awards for their portrayals of Queen Elizabeth I. Geoffrey Rush won the award for Best Supporting Actor. Italian actor Roberto Benigni won the award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in La vita รจ bella (Life Is Beautiful). He went on to win the Academy Award. Peter Weir, director of The Truman Show, won the BAFTA Film Award for Best Directing.
Famous quotes containing the words british, academy and/or film:
“Anthropology is the science which tells us that people are the same the whole world over—except when they are different.”
—Nancy Banks-Smith, British columnist. Quoted in Guardian (London, July 21, 1988)
“When the State wishes to endow an academy or university, it grants it a tract of forest land: one saw represents an academy, a gang, a university.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“All the old supports going, gone, this man reaches out a hand to steady himself on a ledge of rough brick that is warm in the sun: his hand feeds him messages of solidity, but his mind messages of destruction, for this breathing substance, made of earth, will be a dance of atoms, he knows it, his intelligence tells him so: there will soon be war, he is in the middle of war, where he stands will be a waste, mounds of rubble, and this solid earthy substance will be a film of dust on ruins.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)