Despite the good news heralded by the BAFTAs on Sunday night as having one of the most diverse nominations list in recent years, none of the major awards winners were persons of colour.
In fact, every single award winner this year is white.
In the Best Actress category, Michelle Yeoh, Viola Davis and Danielle Deadwyler lost to Cate Blanchett for Tár.
For Best Actor, Daryl McCormack lost to Austin Butler for Elvis. Ke Huy Quan was the only person of colour in the Best Supporting Actor category, though he lost to Barry Keoghan for The Banshees of Inisherin, while Angela Bassett, Hong Chau and Dolly de Leon were all nominees in the Best Supporting Actress category, losing to Kerry Condon for The Banshees of Inisherin.
Since the awards on Sunday night, considered the UK version of the Oscars, criticism has been swift, with #BaftasSoWhite making its round on social media.
Despite the improved diversity of the lineup of nominees in the four major performance categories (three years ago, all 20 nominees were white) it appears that the British academy will be forced to revisit the review they conducted in September 2020 and look for ways to improve it.
The review revealed a number of changes made to the awarding process, including the addition of a thousand new voting BAFTA members with a focus on people from underrepresented minority groups such as “people of colour, women and disabled practitioners.”
Yet none of this seems to have altered the results on Sunday night as the winners were announced.
Bafta chair Krishnendu Majumdar took to the stage on Sunday, telling audiences how his organisation had “responded to the lack of diversity in the film awards nominations and set about transforming Bafta from within”.
“It was a necessary and humbling process that brought about over 120 significant changes to our organisation and our awards,” he said in his opening speech.
“BAFTA and the powerful gate-keepers in this room must continue to listen and learn from the experiences of those around us. Only then will we have meaningful and sustainable change and an industry that is more equitable, accessible and welcoming to all.”
“A moment comes and it comes rarely when we step out of the old and into the new. That time has come. If a venerable institution like BAFTA can open itself up and evolve – I know our industry can too if we have the courage to grasp it.”Nevertheless, the British Academy will need to do a lot of soul-searching if it wants to see systemic improvements in the future.”
Despite big wins for women in the last two years (Chloé Zhao winning Best Director for “Nomadland” in 2021, and Jane Campion winning Best Film for “The Power of the Dog” in 2022, more than twice as many male directors submitted films to be nominated for the Best Director category this year.
This year’s nominations list for Best Director included just one woman — Gina Prince-Bythewood, for The Woman King, who was controversially snubbed for an Oscar nomination.
Better news came for queer writer and director Charlotte Wells, who took home a BAFTAs (Outstanding debut by a British writer, director or producer) on Sunday night for her film Aftersun.
Costume designer Sandy Powell took home the Bafta Fellowship, while Sex Education actor Emma Mackey (known also for her roles in the films Death on the Nile, Eiffel and Emily) won the EE Rising Star award.
Cate Blanchett made an emotional speech while accepting her award for Best Actress, thanking her family, for “…letting me go. “This was… It really did take a lot,” she said.
“It took me away from you an enormous lot. Thank you to my mum for holding the fort and my four extraordinary children.”
Another incident at Sunday’s ceremony is causing a bit of a stir — that of Ariana DeBose’s performance at the beginning of the evening. DeBose, who was last year’s Best Supporting Actress winner, performed a musical number that is being slammed online for being “cringey”, “awkward” and “berserk”.
DeBose rapped about the female nominees of the evening, giving a shout-out to “Charlotte Wells we love Aftersun”, “Hong Chao, Dolly de, Kerry and Carey with a C”, “Blanchett Cate you’re a genius” and “Michelle, I loved you from the start.”
DeBose copped a mesmerisingly unfair load of criticism online — to the point that the 32-year old deleted her Twitter account. You can check out the performance here.