Less than 24 hours after celebrating British success at the Golden Globes in Los Angeles, where the TV series Fleabag and The Crown, and Sam Mendes’s film 1917 were among the winners, the British film and TV industry faced embarrassment. The American films Joker, The Irishman and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood were arguably deserving of at least some of the Bafta nominations they received on Tuesday. That they received 30 between them, while work by women and people of colour was mainly overlooked and British films The Souvenir and Blue Story did not rate a single mention, was hugely disappointing (although four nominations for Syrian war documentary For Sama were among better decisions).
Bafta must now ensure that the review it has promised gets to the heart of the problem. This is not a simple matter of the academy’s roughly 8,000 members voting for the wrong pictures. This year’s unsatisfactory outcome may have more to do with the fact that not all members vote (even the newer ones recruited in recent diversity drives). Given the number of films released, it is questionable how many have been seen by those eligible to have a say. Unless such concerns can be dealt with, the role of specialist chapters and juries (who already play a role in some categories) may need to be beefed up.
For understandable reasons, following the #MeToo movement and longstanding issues around the representation on screen (and behind the camera) of women and minorities, Bafta’s soul searching is likely to focus on these areas. After the success of films including Moonlight and Twelve Years a Slave, last year’s best picture Oscar for the racially conservative Green Book was widely regarded as backsliding, and further attention to such questions is required too in the UK (with colour-blind casting of films such as David Copperfield one example of positive change).
But this is also a good moment for Bafta to reflect more broadly on its remit to support British creativity, as well as providing a warm-up for the Oscars. In many ways, sharing a language with the Americans is useful to British film and television (and music and publishing), smoothing the path to a larger market. The dominance of this year’s Bafta nominations by a handful of Hollywood men is a reminder of the pitfalls. And while the UK government and arts institutions are unlikely ever to ape the cultural protectionism of the French (with their quotas for French-language cinema and music), that doesn’t mean that they should be entirely hands-off.
On the contrary, the approach of Brexit makes questions of identity all the more pressing – as the Costa book prize judges signalled on Monday when they praised Jonathan Coe’s novel Middle England by saying it could help bring the country “back together”. Meanwhile the former BBC director general, Mark Thompson, warned recently that television, a vital forum for national self-expression and storytelling, is under threat from US streaming giants. This is not to suggest that the British (or the English, Scots, Welsh or Northern Irish) should batten down the hatches and embark on an odyssey of introspection. But nor should we, or institutions including Bafta, be blind to the impact of political choices on all our cultural lives.
