Some thoughts on BAFTA

The potential for disaster was there but happily BAFTA resisted the temptation to embrace the faddish and deeply flawed Avatar and instead honoured a deserving film in The Hurt Locker. The six BAFTA haul was a decent tally for a film that looks certain to have a long and prosperous life ahead of it on DVD and satellite after being ignored on its theatrical release.

As for Dances with Smurfs it ended up with two awards - special visual effects and production design - which strikes me as one too many. Visual effects at a stretch but production design, surely not. We are not talking about someone like William Cameron Menzies creating Gone With the Wind here; production design on Avatar amounts to 'if you imagine it we can draw it' which is hardly an insurmountable challenge.

I should declare an interest here as a BAFTA voter in that I was desperately keen to avoid the sort of embarrassment that regularly afflicts the Oscars; how many Oscar winning movies of the past ten years will be regarded as genuinely great films ten years from now? I suspect Oscar may embarrass himself again this year by giving the big prize to Avatar, which is a clever film, and shutting out The Hurt Locker which has the potential to be a film that defines its era. Of course they will give Kathryn Bigelow a well deserved Best Director Oscar and use that as the fig leaf to cover the shame of not having honoured a woman in this category in the past. As for James Cameron, what he did on Avatar was clever and worthy of some kind of recognition but I'm not sure it was directing.

This years results also rather neatly encompass the discussion in BAFTA circles about just how British these awards are. In the Britain vs. Hollywood argument I remain fairly agnostic. There are plenty of awards out there that cater exclusively for British films and for BAFTA to go down this path would be insular and restrictive. British creatives work in a global industry and the awards should reflect this; that said it would have been nice for A Prophet, White Ribbon, or Let the Right One In to have broken out of the foreign language ghetto. It would also be nice if UK audiences were a bit more enthusiastic about home grown product. I'm not talking about blindly supporting UK movies just because they are British - what an awful thought! - but it would be nice in a year when we produced An Education, Nowhere Boy, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll and Moon, to name a few, if at least one of them had done well at the box office.

The closest the awards came to tokenism is in the Leading Actor and Leading Actress category. I think Carey Mulligan is a deserved winner for An Education but, personally, I think Jeff Bridges on Crazy Heart is better than Colin Firth in A Single Man. However if this did come down to a Yanks vs. Brits contest it would be churlish to grudge Firth for a great performance which comes midway through a career of great performances. Both Bridges and Firth have in common the fact that although they have made bad movies they have seldom been bad in them. Their weakness has always been in their choices and an opportunity like this may never come along again; it's a shame it comes for both of them in the same year.