The winners of the Baftas (British Academy of Film and Television Awards) were announced on Sunday evening and as always there were celebrations for the victors and sympathy for the losers of the last major awards ceremony before the Oscars.
There was also more than a little incredulity and outrage at the undeniably white makeup of the winners podium. Like the Oscars, the Baftas have come under increasing criticism for failing to acknowledge the contributions made to the British film industry by filmmakers of colour since the #BAFTAsSoWhite hashtag first started trending on social media eight years ago.
To deal with this problem the BAFTAs did what its US cousins in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did: in 2020 it opened up the membership to its voting structures to a wider range of industry players, to try to ensure that its nominations would reflect more inclusive racial, gender and cultural diversity.
At first blush it seemed that the nominations for this year’s ceremony were a positive reflection of the Baftas diversity efforts. Films such as Gina Prince-Bythewood’s The Woman King and Chinonye Chukwu’s Till, which were passed over for nomination by the Oscars, earned their deserved place on the Baftas nomination list.
The final outcome, however, was quickly met with righteous indignation when a photo of the winners circulated on social media and was criticised for the fact that the only person of colour in it was co-host Alison Hammond, who wasn’t even a nominee let alone a winner.
Critics acknowledge that there is little merit in trying to debate whether films or performances by people of colour are better than those by white filmmakers who won on the night. But they were quick to point out that while no-one is saying that anyone should have won awards based solely on race, there is still clearly a racial prejudice problem in the broader British film industry.
As Amon Warmann wrote in Variety, “inclusive nominees is one thing: if they don’t win, has the needle moved that much, if at all?” If all the Baftas are really doing is opening up membership to a more diverse group of voters who still make conservative, easy choices, then what real difference will that ultimately make?
It’s slippery territory that the Academy in the US is also negotiating, with its recent diversity membership drive still seeming to mostly reward safe bet choices come Oscar night. Increased visibility for people of colour on the nominations list and within voting structures may not be enough to deal with deeper structural racism in the film industry, which is a problem that no amount of awards will suddenly be able to change overnight.
No book is so good that you can’t turn it into a terrible film.
There was perhaps no greater indication of the failure of the Baftas to move the needle on issues of race than the success of the German language World War 1 film All Quiet on the Western Front, which won seven awards, including a surprise win for Best Picture.
Few films are as obviously lily-white as director Edward Berger’s gritty and brutal adaptation of the seminal 1928 pacifist novel by Erich Maria Remarque. Produced and heavily campaigned for by Netflix, the film has been panned by critics in its native Germany for a lack of fidelity to its beloved source material and what they see as its clear willingness to elevate spectacle over accuracy in its “horny for Oscar” ambitions, which have earned it nine nominations for this year’s Academy Awards.
One Munich critic decried the film for demonstrating that, “no book is so good that you can’t turn it into a terrible film”, but such criticism in Germany has not stopped the film from becoming an international awards darling and, after its win on Sunday at the Baftas, moving far up the list of serious contenders for an eventual Oscars Best Picture win.
Speculation is that Berger’s deal with Netflix has helped to ensure that the film has high visibility on the platform, to regularly shove it under the noses of voters ahead of the ceremony. Its heart-wrenching pleas for pacifism and appeals to the idea of the futility of war have also only been given fuel by the recent real-world despair at the war in the Ukraine. Thanks to its timing and its distribution on a globally accessible platform, the negative reception of the film by the critics in its homeland, has ultimately meant little in the way of obstacles to its popular and awards success.
All Quiet on the Western Front could realistically win the Best Picture Oscar because ironically, while the membership diversity drive at the Academy and other awards bodies may not yet have yielded results for nonwhite contenders. What it has done in recent years, is open up the possibilities for non-English-language films to compete in major categories and win. What the Oscar-winning Korean director of Parasite Bong Joon-ho once described as the “one-inch barrier of subtitles”, has been increasingly erased thanks to a new generation of audiences for whom subtitles are the norm in their watching habits. And foreign language films are now able to compete against their English counterparts for top honours, which is a welcome and much-needed change.
Whether Berger’s film — which in spite of its many German critics’ disgust, is objectively a pretty solid, engaging and moving war film — has what it takes to beat its bigger-name director and Hollywood-star-studded competitors on Oscar night, remains to be seen. For film-makers and stars of colour however, it’s of little concern as the majority of the Oscar race remains #sowhite once again.
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