What's Going On With The BAFTAs?
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
Yesterday, the British Academy Film Awards were announced, and they looked like they always do: predictable, straight forward, and as per usual. Except none of that is true. At all. If anything, I have personally never seen the BAFTAs this scattershot: with nominees of different films just creating this mosaic of candidates, rather than a few clear frontrunners to clean up shop. We have some films that did well overall, including obvious works like Nomadland and Minari, but otherwise, most “dominant” films only have a handful of nominations tossed into each set of categories.
Don’t believe me? The Father has a few of the main awards (mainly for film and British film, as well as Anthony Hopkins), but nothing for Olivia Colman. Promising Young Woman has six nominations, and none of them are for potential Oscar frontrunner Carey Mulligan. Rocks has a ton of nominations, including Outstanding British Film, and yet nothing for Best Film (very strange). The Trial of the Chicago 7 is up for Best Film though, and for its writing, and for its editing. Yeah. Peculiar. Why is that up for Best Film instead of, say, Rocks?
The entire list is all over the place, but I think it’s for good reason. Last year, the BAFTAs were under extreme scrutiny for their lack of diverse representation, particularly within their acting nominees; this is especially troubling considering how other academies have tried a little bit to be better in the last couple of years. Now, the BAFTAs are trying to keep up, and this is the result: a huge amount of representation, and borderline zero predictability (outside of Nomadland, maybe). Even though it seems scatterbrained, this means that individual voters put a lot of thought into who they really wanted to be selected.
There are some hints of the BAFTAs of old, including some major love for The Mauritanian (nothing for Golden Globes winner Jodie Foster, though, but I digress), but there are many signs of a BAFTAs of new. Minari is all over the categories, and not just in the FIlm Not In The English Language group. Shannon Murphy is nominated for Best Director for Babyteeth (despite it not being nominated for anything else). There is a lot of wonkiness, but in that lies a heap of promise: the promise of a BAFTAs that is sprinting forward in representation and art. If the BAFTAs end up being this random for another few years, at least it’s understandable.
Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Ryerson University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.