It is at this point that our cosy awards season tips into air-traffic nightmare, like some fevered, Sweded version of Pushing Tin re-enacted with gold statuettes. The Golden Globes have barely left the runway, outbound for oblivion, when the Baftas hove into view, its business class crammed with many of the same passengers we thought we'd only just waved off. The whole thing's confusing; it's starting to blur. Surely there must be an award for the harassed, faceless controller in charge of ensuring that all these awards don't collide in some ghastly mid-air fireball.
Until then we're left with the Bafta nominations, with its happy huddle of The Help and The Artist, The Descendants and Tintin. We've seen these names before and will doubtless see them again when the Oscar shortlist is announced next week. For all that, Bafta deserves credit for recognising a range of other, often better titles that have hitherto failed to make it through passport control.
It throws a lifeline, for instance, to the terrific Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Lynne Ramsay's flawed but compelling We Need to Talk About Kevin. It acknowledges the chill, blank brilliance of Nicolas Winding Refn's Drive and puts Senna on the starting grid in the race for the best British film award. I'm particularly impressed by the directors' category, which finds room for Refn, Ramsay, Michel Hazanavicius and Tomas Alfredson. In fact, judged purely on current form, Martin Scorsese (who won the directing Globe for Hugo) is arguably the weakest name on an excellent list.
Hosting the Golden Globes on Sunday night, Ricky Gervais jokingly conceded that those awards were that "bit trashier" than the Oscars – a glittery irrelevance, the Kim Kardashian to the Academy's pristine Kate Middleton. The implication here was that all the other film awards are simply dying to be the Oscars, tottering pitifully about in their finery, like a reality TV-star trying to pass for royalty.
But perhaps there is a third way. This year's nominations position Bafta, rather nicely, as a semi-autonomous adjunct of the awards circus – happy to garland the usual suspects while still reserving space for first-class work (Tyrannosaur; Project Nim) that is too small, too thorny (and yes, too British) to stand a chance elsewhere. It is neither Kim nor Kate, and thank heavens for that. It is the British Academy Film Awards; jostling to find a landing strip, a role to play and (on the basis of today's nominations) getting the balance by and large right.
