The Baftas, which is often seen as a key indicator of where the Oscars are heading, left commentators none the wiser, paving the way for a tantalising finale to this year's awards season.

With less than two weeks to go until this year's Oscars, we've reached the stage where most of the results should be boringly easy to predict. Awards season gets going with the Golden Globes – held on 5 January this year – and in the weeks that follow there are so many prize-givings thrown by so many guilds and critics' associations that by the time the Oscars themselves roll around, they can seem anticlimactic. By then, everyone knows that Oppenheimer is going to win a stack of trophies, or that the best picture prize is a coin-flip between a couple of favourites – La La Land v Moonlight, Coda v The Power of the Dog – so what is there left to get excited about? Sometimes, the Oscars can feel like a round-up of all the preceding award ceremonies rather than a ceremony in itself.

Not this year. With several horses still neck and neck on the home stretch, this is one of the closest and most thrilling Oscar races ever. The odds keep changing, different awards bodies keep going in different directions, and pundits keep struggling to say with any confidence who the big winners are going to be. The Baftas sum up the glorious confusion. The British film industry's glitziest gala was held in London on Sunday evening, but the event, which is often seen as a key indicator of where the Oscars are heading, left commentators none the wiser.

Conclave won the prizes for best film, best British film, best adapted screenplay and best editing, so Edward Berger's exquisitely clever and well-crafted Vatican-set thriller, adapted from Robert Harris's novel, might seem to be a clear frontrunner at the Academy Awards. But the film's star, Ralph Fiennes, didn't win the best actor Bafta, an award for which he'd been widely tipped. Instead, the trophy went to Adrien Brody for

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