Baffling BAFTAs
Why do I keep watching awards shows? The question is rhetorical, but feel free to send in your answers anyway.
I don’t watch all awards shows—just the movie ones, and not even all of them. I pretty much restrict myself to the Academy Awards (the American ones), the BAFTAs (the British ones), the IFTAs (the Irish ones) and (sigh) the Golden Globes. Oh yeah, and sometimes the Emmys.
The BAFTAs were on Sunday night, and I have to say this show is the best of the lot. Maybe it’s because the ceremony is held in the afternoon and then delayed-broadcast in the evening. That gives the producers time to have the broadcast edited and cleaned up. Like the way they fixed that little contretemps where actor Troy Kotsur, presenting the Supporting Actress award, announced Kerry Condon’s name but the audio interpreter translated it as Carey Mulligan. We home viewers didn’t see that at all. There was just an awkward edit jump and then we heard the female star of The Banshees of Inisherin announced as the winner. Boy, Warren Beatty sure could have used a system like that six years ago with that La La Land/Moonlight fiasco.
The BAFTA broadcast model is really the best of both worlds. It tightens up the show’s runtime but not to the extreme extent as the edited/abridged version of the Oscars that gets broadcast internationally the following day. The other problem (at least for people who like to be surprised) with the condensed Oscar show is that you already know who the winners are by the time you see it. With the BAFTAs, you only have to avoid glancing at your smartphone for a couple of hours. Or longer if you further complicate the time-delay thing by recording the show and playing it back later.
Personally, I found this year’s BAFTAs delightful. It was as though we had gone back to a simpler time. The host was the charming and witty Richard E. Grant, who would have been worth watching even if no awards were being given out. His co-host was gregarious TV personality Alison Hammond, Grant’s opposite in just about every way except in congeniality. She spent most of the broadcast in another studio interviewing winners and other miscellaneous people, apparently live and in real time, which kind of made things a bit confusing. To make it even more bewildering, the final four awards were also presented live and in real time, making me wonder how they kept the audience entertained during the gap in between.
I had such a good time watching Grant and Hammond and watching the gracious and heartfelt acceptance speeches (none of which was ever interrupted by a single note of playoff music) that I should have just savored the afterglow of the evening and not made the mistake of looking at any media the next day. But of course, I did.
“The Baftas promised much but the ceremony felt flat in the end – here’s what the BBC needs to change,” blared the headline over Emma Kelly’s critique in The Irish Independent. “[W]hen the camera panned through the glittering audience,” she groaned, “they may as well have been watching a seminar on sound editing. Bar Jamie Lee Curtis and Emma Thompson–you can always count on them–there was barely a shoulder shimmy to be seen.” Okay (I guess).
Ed Potton, writing in The Times of London, itemized “13 things we learnt” from the show, and No. 1 was: “While not quite Mick Fleetwood-and-Samantha Fox bad, the pairing of Richard E Grant and Alison Hammond was pretty dreadful.” Sigh.
But leave it to The Guardian to cut to the heart of the matter. Its headline: “The return of #BaftasSoWhite, three years after diversity outcry.” A Sky News presenter is quoted: “I watched clips of the #BAFTAS and didn’t see a single black or brown person win.” That can’t be disputed, but it kind of ignores all the diversity that was on display among the nominees, in the audience and among the various presenters and performers. But all those roles are not the same as being winners.
And that gets to the core of the problem with awards ceremonies in the first place. By their nature, they are not representative or truly reflective of quality. Silly naïve me, I was feeling good about the BAFTAs because they had the good sense to nominate Danielle Deadwyler for her lead performance in Chinonye Chukwu’s Till—something the U.S.’s movie academy failed to do. Turns out people don’t actually believe that “everyone’s a winner” tripe after all. Yet it seems pointless to blame the Oscars for their omission, and even more so to blame poor Andrea Riseborough, who got nominated (for To Leslie, a lesser seen and less critically hailed film)—along with four other people, it must be said—after an effective studio campaign.
The problem with complaining about a body’s choice of nominees—and winners—is that there are two possible outcomes to doing so. Either it will make no difference or else it will. If it makes no difference, then what’s the point? If it does make a difference, then it will only lessen the value of certain awards in the minds of many people because the choices will be seen to have been made under duress.
Perhaps it would be better not to give out awards for artistic/entertainment performances at all, but where’s the fun in that? That just ignores the true purpose of these awards: to give us all something to complain about.
People on this side of the Atlantic are under some sort of impression that the BAFTAs are a harbinger for the Oscars. I’m not sure Americans are aware of this—except of course the ones who get nominated for some of these Brit awards. Media types tell us that, because of its seven BAFTA awards, All Quiet on the Western Front is now “tipped” to sweep the Oscars. Okay.
Yet in the day or so since its somewhat surprising BAFTA triumph, the film is now experiencing a bit of a backlash. For one thing, the movie has not been received with much critical enthusiasm inside Germany—in contrast to its positive reception elsewhere. Critics have lambasted it for not being faithful enough to the source novel. “At a rough estimate,” wrote the Süddeutsche Zeitung, “eight or more tenths of the film consists of scenes that have not only little but nothing to do with the book. If the characters in the film did not have the same names as in the book—Paul Bäumer, Albert Kropp, Kat—it would be difficult to find any parallels worth mentioning.”
Some insightful critics (but not me, though I swear the thought occurred to me while watching it) have said that filmmaker Edward Berger basically did the same thing to Erich Maria Remarque’s book as Robert Heinlein (and Paul Verhoeven in the film adaptation) did to it in Starship Troopers, i.e. took the basic plot and turned the entertainment value up to eleven.
So why did Berger’s blockbuster win in the end? One suspects that, in a illogically twisted way, it was nearly some sort of gesture of support to what Ukraine is currently going through. If that’s true, then its wins may not be as much as a harbinger for the Oscars as some people think. Generally speaking, I don’t think people in the States are emotionally affected in quite the same way as Europeans about the Ukraine situation.
It may be an omen in a different way, though. As in the Oscar competition, the BAFTAs nominated All Quiet for both best picture and best non-English picture. It won in both categories on Sunday, eclipsing the true best movie of last year: Colm Bairéad’s Irish language film The Quiet Girl. I sincerely hope the same does not happen in Los Angeles.
-S.L., 21 February 2023
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