The timing of the Bafta awards, weeks before the Oscars, has made them a useful rear-view mirror on the year, offering a glimpse of who the shock losers and surprise winners might be of the prizes that everyone most wants to bag.
In terms of taste and priorities, the differences can be as revealing as the similarities. That one of the year’s leftfield successes, the wacky, reality-hopping Everything Everywhere All at Once, only took one Bafta – for editing – from nine nominations, was hardly surprising, given that it was nothing, nowhere, not at all in UK roundups of the best films of last year. It has been hoovering up critics’ awards across the US and should do better in the Oscars.
Still, Everything Everywhere’s Malaysian star Michelle Yeoh – who lost the best actress Bafta to Cate Blanchett – could console herself that Ariana DeBose loved her “from the start”. The namecheck came in a roll-of-honour rap by the Bafta- and Oscar-winning West Side Story actor, celebrating all the women in contention, which was panned by viewers as cheesy. Others complained that winners’ speeches were cut, and one academy member went so far as to resign over an “embarrassing travesty” of a ceremony.
However underwhelming, it was hardly up there with Oscars scandals: Will Smith slapping the host Chris Rock last year for cracking a joke about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith; or 2017’s winner-gate, when an envelope mix-up led to Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announcing the wrong best picture. (A “crisis team” is reportedly being hired to avert any similar gaffes at this year’s Academy Awards.)
The real issue is that, three years after the failure to nominate any actors of colour sparked the #BaftasSoWhite campaign and an organisational overhaul, no main award went to a person of colour – even though 10 were nominated among the 24 up for acting gongs. The Oscars have also provoked outrage this year by denying nominations to Viola Davis (The Woman King) and Danielle Deadwyler (Till), in the context of Andrea Riseborough gaining one, following some smart address-book lobbying for the low-budget To Leslie.
It’s in nobody’s interest to be garlanded out of a sense of duty, and one person’s win should not be glibly equated with another’s loss. But there are fair questions to be asked about what work is valued and why. Chinonye Chukwu, the director of Till, wasn’t a lone voice when she protested that her film, about Mamie Till’s fight for justice following her son’s racist murder, was ignored by the American Academy because of its commitment to “upholding whiteness” and its “unabashed misogyny towards Black women”.
As Sheila Atim, a nominee for Bafta’s rising star award, has pointed out, Halle Berry remains the only black woman with a best actress Oscar, two decades after she won it. The cascade of initiatives arising from the Black Lives Matter movement will only amount to anything, said Atim, with “healing … education … the introduction of new ways of doing things, and then ensuring that those introductions are sustainable”. Awards ceremonies are simply useful markers on a long and rocky road.
