Why it’s time to shut down the BAFTAs

It’s the most dispir­it­ing day in the film cal­en­dar: wak­ing up to the annu­al BAF­TA film nom­i­na­tions and real­is­ing that we are forced to wor­ship at the altar of an awards body which seems hap­py to remain fierce­ly out of touch with the cur­rents of mod­ern film cul­ture. In a year where most film award wags believed that there was no dead cert front-run­ner, BAF­TA has proven, once again, that it’s always pos­si­ble to dif­fuse any poten­tial thrill by piv­ot­ing hard towards bland safe­ty and parochial obviousness.

I don’t want to spend too much time list­ing who’s nom­i­nat­ed, as that’s all out in the pub­lic domain and you can form your own opin­ions about whether the short­list offers a grat­i­fy­ing fres­co of cin­e­ma in 2019 (hint: it doesn’t). I do want to say why it’s time for a tem­po­rary clo­sure to re-tool and re-fit this old guard insti­tu­tion – per­haps with a view to build­ing in some mech­a­nism that will pre­vent the large major­i­ty of the film com­mu­ni­ty from see­ing these awards as a toad­y­ing and out-of-shape cheer­leader for its US counterparts.

Sure, as some­one who is gift­ed with a fair amount of time to watch movies as and when they drop down the chute, I write this from a posi­tion of rel­a­tive priv­i­lege and per­haps don’t have a full pic­ture of what’s being shown and who’s able to watch what in the lim­it­ed win­dow they have. These nom­i­na­tions, how­ev­er, reflect a mem­ber­ship that has dipped its col­lec­tive toe in the absolute shal­low­est part of the pool and then gone ahead and filed their bal­lots. There’s very lit­tle sense of inde­pen­dent thought, or the belief that BAF­TA real­ly do need to claim some kind of dis­tinct iden­ti­ty to retain their ongo­ing relevance.

First order of busi­ness: the BAF­TA social team would real­ly do well to update their cur­rent Twit­ter ban­ner as it absolute­ly does not rep­re­sent the cur­rent crop of nom­i­nees. No peo­ple of colour were deemed wor­thy of a nom­i­na­tion in any of the main cat­e­gories – a prob­lem com­pound­ed by the fact that Mar­got Rob­bie has been short­list­ed twice in the Sup­port­ing Actress cat­e­go­ry for Once Upon a Time… in Hol­ly­wood and Bomb­shell. This real­ly feels like a salt-in-the-wound ges­ture, the mes­sage being that even when we’ve got an open slot, there’s absolute­ly no way we’re going to look beyond a nar­row catch­ment of super­mar­ket aisle Hol­ly­wood royalty.

Rob­bie – a vocal cham­pi­on of diver­si­ty in the film indus­try – must sure­ly be embar­rassed at hav­ing this dubi­ous hon­our bestowed upon her at the expense of a fuller, live­li­er and per­haps more deserv­ing selec­tion of tal­ent. It also puts her in the awk­ward posi­tion of poten­tial­ly los­ing twice. The optics are bad whichev­er way you slice it, serv­ing to undo some of the pos­i­tive steps tak­en dur­ing last year’s awards sea­son, in which the likes of Roma and BlacK­kKlans­man picked up sil­ver­ware. Scar­lett Johans­son, too, is up for the dou­ble, with nods for Mar­riage Sto­ry and Jojo Rab­bit. They are each in dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories, but this choice again points to an aggres­sive unwill­ing­ness to gar­land those who don’t have an exist­ing celebri­ty pro­file or, you know, white skin.

The diver­si­ty chal­lenges (which BAF­TA itself has acknowl­edged) con­tin­ue in the Best Film and Best Direc­tor cat­e­gories, which are both a men-only affairs. Gre­ta Ger­wig and Joan­na Hogg deliv­ered arguably two of the year’s finest with Lit­tle Women and The Sou­venir respec­tive­ly, but for some rea­son they have been deemed unwor­thy of acknowl­edge­ment. It reeks of igno­rance, and gen­er­ates an image of the vot­ing body as ginned-up news­pa­per barons decked out in soiled crick­et whites. Maybe this isn’t the case, but more should be done to make it at least seem like these films were not being vot­ed for by all the peo­ple you might expect to see stand­ing in the audi­ence of Top Gear.

There are some pos­i­tives in the mix, but they will go large­ly unmen­tioned because they are not the sto­ry and they will not be the sto­ry. If BAF­TA doesn’t exist to cel­e­brate peo­ple like Lupi­ta Nyong’o or Joan­na Hogg or Cyn­thia Eri­vo, then it has no rea­son to exist. These nom­i­na­tions need to make the case for life, but the mes­sage this year comes loud and clear: do not resuscitate.