BAFTA’s Efforts to Level the Field Bear Fruit

The most rewarding moment of last year’s BAFTA ceremony came with the presentation of the lead actress award: As Joanna Scanlan was named the winner for her moving turn as a widow uncovering her husband’s double life in the British indie “After Love,” her visibly emotional reaction was matched by the palpable warmth of the applause. But a large part of the reason it was so memorable was because, in the long run of precursor awards and televised ceremonies that make up Oscar season, this moment belonged to BAFTA alone. Versions of Scanlan’s speech hadn’t been heard a dozen times before; she wasn’t even eligible for prizes Stateside.

This was a case of the British Academy voters honoring one of their own with little regard for their place in the U.S. race. Scanlan’s unusual win, however, was only enabled because of a rarer occurrence still: Thanks partially to jury intervention in compiling the nominees, there was zero overlap between the BAFTA and Oscar slates for lead actress, essentially freeing the Brits to go their own way.

There’s less chance this year of BAFTA voters going rogue when winners are announced at the Feb.19 ceremomy: across all categories, their nominees feature the presumed Oscar front-runners, though the numbers tilt a little differently here and there. With a whopping 14 noms, the German WWI epic “All Quiet on the Western Front” handily leads the BAFTA field, though Oscar voters didn’t go quite that far; their nomination-topper, the delirious multiverse comedy “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” settled for eight nominations from BAFTA. These aren’t seismic inconsistencies: the other three best film BAFTA nominees, “The Banshees of Inisherin,” “Tár” and “Elvis,” also all met with equivalent Academy approval. Ditto such hotly fancied actors as Cate Blanchett, Michelle Yeoh, Colin Farrell, Austin Butler, Brendan Fraser, Ke Huy Quan and Angela Bassett.

It’s a wide-ranging slate, which is what BAFTA CEO Jane Millichip — after acknowledging that “there’s always progress to be made” — is most pleased with this year, and attributes to a new voting adjustment that requires members to see a mandatory number of films in randomly assigned groups before voting — designed to counter both biases in viewing selection and ensure all eligible films are seen by a core number of voters.

“I think the new process is actually throwing up another fantastic dimension, which is we’re seeing greater breadth in narrative styles and genres as a result of this,” she says. “Because the principle of the change was to level the playing field.”

BAFTA asserted its own taste most visibly by mostly passing over two best picture Oscar nominees from Tinseltown titans: Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical “The Fabelmans,” handed a single writing nom, and James Cameron’s blockbuster “Avatar: The Way of Water,” which managed just two technical bids. Both are American artifacts, steeped in myths or methods of Hollywood movie-making that perhaps don’t resonate as deeply with British voters: “Top Gun: Maverick,” another emphatically all-American phenomenon that hit big with AMPAS voters, was also limited to technical recognition at BAFTA. The British Academy is by no means averse to American cinema, but maybe there’s a limit to the amount of beefy flag-waving they can take.

Yet there isn’t much of a local flavor to this year’s BAFTA nominees either. The only British production among the best film nominees is Martin McDonagh’s Irish-set tragicomedy “The Banshees of Inisherin,” though that factor may help spur it to a win; veterans Emma Thompson and Bill Nighy are the only Brits nominated in the lead acting categories, for “Good Luck to You, Leo Grande” and “Living,” respectively, though that probably won’t be enough to vault them ahead of more loudly hyped front-runners.

Meanwhile, Scottish writer-director Charlotte Wells’ wrenching debut “Aftersun,” which topped critics’ lists on both sides of the pond and swept December’s British Independent Film Awards, was shut out of the best film, director and screenplay categories — much to the disappointment of pundits who had hoped BAFTA might foreground a homegrown international success story from the independent sphere. (It managed noms for Irish leading man Paul Mescal and for casting, plus a pair of bids in BAFTA’s British-only categories.) “If we aren’t championing a film like that on an international scale, what’s the point of having our own awards?” says one disgruntled voter.

BAFTA’s peculiar status as an awards ceremony that identifies itself both nationally and internationally — unlike, say, the Césars, which are limited to French cinema — is a recurring source of frustration to many members. Some accuse them of being too parochial — this is a group, after all, that solved the great “L.A. Confidential” versus “Titanic” debate of 2007 by voting for “The Full Monty” instead — while others say they don’t sufficiently celebrate their homegrown talent.

Certainly, British indie cinema continues to be a blind spot: if “Aftersun” at least got a modicum of recognition, the absence of strong films including Sebastián Lelio’s Brechtian faith inquiry “The Wonder,” Georgia Oakley’s stirring gay-rights drama “Blue Jean” or Frances O’Connor’s vibrant literary biopic “Emily” from any general BAFTA categories seems regrettable. If BAFTA’s recent expansion of its British film category to 10 nominees seemed in part a transparent attempt to make up for this shortfall — why not the best film category too, after all? — the category still becomes a bit of a sop when one vastly dominant nominee such as “Banshees” will clearly cruise to a win.

This problem was one of several issues of balance and representation that were addressed two years ago when BAFTA radically overhauled its voting system, forming small juries to determine nominees from membership-voted longlists in major categories. The result was a pleasingly adventurous and diverse slate of nominees that paid little mind to the established trends of the season, where female art-house outsiders including Shannon Murphy (“Babyteeth”) and Jasmila Žbanić (“Quo Vadis, Aida?”) could compete alongside eventual winner Chloé Zhao, or where British indie breakouts Bukky Bakray and Wunmi Mosaku could pip Carey Mulligan to a lead actress nom.

Critics were delighted, while some BAFTA members complained they’d been taken out of their own voting process. BAFTA has responded over the past two years by tweaking the rules slightly to accommodate a balance of popular voting and jury curation: This year’s tasteful but somewhat less boldly idiosyncratic nominees reflect the results of that listening and adjusting, though the system still permits the odd bracing surprise, such as Thompson’s “Leo Grande” co-star Daryl McCormack landing in the lead actor race, or Gina Prince-Bythewood beating the odds to a directing nomination.

That Prince-Bythewood is the only female nominee to crack the director lineup, from a longlist designed to be gender-equal, is a disappointment; in the past two years, women filled at least half those slots. Is more tweaking in order, or is BAFTA content at this point to let the chips fall where they may?

“I think that there are always adjustments to be made,” says Millichip. “It’ll take us a little while to reflect on this year’s nominations and the whole process to make sure that we are relevant and representative. And so we will meet this summer and look again to see if it does need tweaking. We have to make sure that the intervention is sufficient to ensure that we’ve got proper representation, but that there’s still a still a strong trust in the fact that the nominations are made on their merits.”

If BAFTA’s current approach, then, seems to be one of two steps forward and one step back, that’s still forward movement in the long run. In the meantime, members will cross fingers for at least a few winners as refreshing as they are deserving.

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