After BAFTA’s Mostly White Winners, Experts Say Focus Should Be on U.K. Film Industry
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Since the curtain came down on the 2023 BAFTAs on Sunday night, there’s been a lot of noise about the winners at the film ceremony — specifically, about the vast majority of them being white.
As was highlighted in a group photo at the end of the evening, 47 of the 49 winners are white (it was widely reported in the U.K. press that they were all white, but Guillermo del Toro and Florencia Martin are Latinx). The only Black star onstage was ceremony co-host Alison Hammond.
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The sharp criticism that landed was in stark contrast to the praise BAFTA had received — some of it just days earlier — over its nominees, which were a hugely diverse set of names and titles. Almost 40 percent of acting slots were taken by nonwhite individuals, including many people snubbed by AMPAS voters (most notably, Viola Davis for The Woman King). But it wasn’t enough to translate into wins.
The criticism also came three years after the #BAFTASoWhite controversy erupted over BAFTA’s all-white acting nominees in 2020, a scandal that prompted the British Academy to undergo a grueling nine-month review and overhaul that led to more than 120 changes to its awards processes and rules (and is still ongoing). It was this that, since 2021 when the changes were first applied, has led to an impressively diverse array of nominees (the 2021 list was the most diverse in BAFTAs history).
However, in an article in The Guardian, writer and critic Leila Latif claimed that on the night of the 2023 BAFTAs there had been a “creeping discomfort that the awards were benefiting from the work and presence of many people of color without ever handing them a statuette.”
But for all the anger over the winners, it should be noted that they largely followed what had been predicted.
Davis would have been a surprising win for leading actress, with Blanchett having been in the driver’s seat for the award since Tár first premiered in Venice (and for a film with much more European slant than fellow favorite Michelle Yeoh’s Everything Everywhere All at Once). Same with Angela Bassett (Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) and Dolly De Leon (Triangle of Sadness) for supporting actress, which was won by Kerry Condon for The Banshees of Inisherin, the only British film being represented in that category.
Ke Huy Quan could well have taken best supporting actor, but the victory by Banshees’ star Barry Keoghan was one of the most celebrated wins of the night, especially with his own inspiring journey from a child living in the foster care system to celebrated awards season favorite having become a major talking point. In the Rising Star category, Naomi Ackie was arguably the more established name and had taken on the biggest challenge — playing Whitney Houston in biopic I Wanna Dance With Somebody — but that was the one award voted on by the public (it went to Sex Education and Emily star Emma Mackey).
As Marcus Ryder, director of consultancy at the Sir Lenny Henry Centre for Media Diversity, notes in a blog, the focus should not be on the BAFTAs, the end of the filmmaking pipeline, but on the industry in general, and those people whose decisions ultimately lead to the films people eventually see being represented at the awards.
“And for all intents and purposes that remains overwhelmingly white, and no amount of reviewing and overhauling the BAFTA nominations process will change that,” he says.
Ryder points to studies showing that women of color make up less than 2 percent of British film directors (and more than 80 percent of their films are under 60 minutes long) and how Black, Asian and minority ethnic individuals were “twice less likely to get department head and key off-screen roles.”
“The people who pick up the awards, the people who we see on the red carpet and the stage almost do not matter. They are just the small visible tip of a far larger film industry iceberg,” he notes, later adding that the “entire iceberg is rotten — we can’t fix it just by making tweaks to the bit we can see.”
But that doesn’t entirely excuse BAFTA in the eyes of one notable figure in the British industry.
According to agent Femi Oguns, who established the groundbreaking Identity School of Acting and lists John Boyega among his clients, the British Academy’s voter base ultimately plays a major part in choosing who is deemed awards-worthy or not, and this group is still predominantly white and male.
BAFTA — which hasn’t commented on the reaction to this year’s majority white winners — last published the makeup of its voters in June 2021, showing that 12.2 percent were from an ethnic minority background (and 37.4 percent were women). As part of its review process in 2020, BAFTA said that it was adding 1,000 new members from under-represented groups and set a goal of reaching 20 percent from minority ethnic backgrounds by 2025. It’s expected to publish its latest figures this year.
“If you don’t diversify your voting body, you can’t diversify opinion or taste,” Oguns tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Less than 50 percent of the voting membership are of color or female, but in this particular instance it brings up a broader question, which extends further than the lack of visibility in this year’s BAFTAs. Diverse films have simply not been given the same attention, the same funding, or the same marketing. And it begs the question: How can people vote for what they cannot easily see?”
