Everything You Need to Know Before the 2023 BAFTAs
We’re days away from the BAFTAs, where the highest order of British talent, critics, and industry members will reveal their picks for the best films, performances, and craft over the last 12 months and what looks like a fairly standard array of nominations for this awards season is actually loaded with a whole lot of backstory. You’ll notice from a cursory read of any awards punditry that, in terms of the precursors to the all-important Oscars, the BAFTAs are up there with the Screen Actors Guild awards as the most influential and revealing for what the Academy will pick. Often the awards for acting match the Oscars exactly, even though since the new millennium.
However, the BAFTA Best Film award and the Oscar for Best Picture have coincided only nine times, so it’s not certain the former will predict the latter. But even engaging with this mindset reveals a problem with BAFTA coverage and nominations — they are largely only regarded as another step on the road towards a more important ceremony.
It was welcome then that the last few years have seen a profound change-up in how the nominees are calculated. A few years of all-white nominees caused a groundswell in criticism targeted at the British Academy’s voting membership, which presumably has entrenched some of Britain’s famous elitist classism (inevitable, as the BAFTA president is first in line to the throne). A series of amendments to address this were adopted: the membership was to go through unconscious bias training, half the directing nominees in the 20-person longlist were to be female, and latter-stage voting could only be carried out if all the nominated films had been watched (first used in 2022).
