Although it has been a few days since the announcement of the shortlist for the Baptisterie Film Awards, the controversy it has sparked has not subsided. The cliché is that the director candidate has not had a woman for seven consecutive years, and what has come under fire even more fiercely is that all the candidates for the four acting awards of Best Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor and Supporting Actress are all white actors, and no Asian, African or Hispanic actors appear. As a result, netizens' vomiting came and went, and "#英国学院奖太白" (#BAFTAsSoWhite) quickly became a hot search on social media.
A few years ago, the outside world was still criticizing the "Oscar too white" (#OscarsSoWhite), but after several years of hard work, the last two Oscars have made sufficient efforts in diversity and gradually got rid of the notoriety of racial discrimination. In contrast, the British Film Institute, with its 6,700 members, does seem to be lagging behind. In the eyes of the outside world, there are so many non-white actors to choose from in 2019, such as "We" heroine Lupita Nyong'o, "Harriet" Cynthia Aliver, Jennifer Lopez of "The Dancing Girl", Okafina of "Don't Tell Her", Eddie Murphy of "My Name is Domat", and Antonio Banderas of "Pain and Glory", all of whom were not nominated for this year's British Academy Film Awards. On the contrary, Scarlett Johnson alone took two nominations for Best Actress and Supporting Actress; Margot Robbie also received two nominations for Best Supporting Actress, one of which is still like a vase of "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood", which really makes many people feel a bit unreasonable.
All the candidates for this year's BAFTA Awards finalists for best actor, actress, supporting actor and supporting actress are all white actors
In the face of these criticisms, at first, Ms Emma Baehr, the head of the British Academy Awards Department in charge of awards, felt a little aggrieved. While acknowledging that "we also want the list of candidates to be more diverse," she reluctantly said: "It has always been a problem for the entire industry." The implication is not that the Academy Awards judges don't consider female directors and non-white actors, but that they don't have enough good work. But soon, the british film academy executives, who felt inappropriate, still changed their tone in an interview with the media, took the initiative to admit their shortcomings, and their attitude was quite sincere. Amanda Berry, the academy's chief executive, and Marc Samuelson, chairman of the academy's film committee, are currently the two heads of the british film school at the highest level, and have also jointly written an open letter to the academy's 6,700 members expressing disappointment and frustration at their voting results and informing them that the next step is for the academy to self-examine and self-correct the entire voting mechanism, aiming to improve it before next year's awards season.
The current BAFTA Awards selection system, like the Oscars, is divided into two stages: primary selection and final selection. The primary election determines the list of nominees, and in the process, all 6,700 members of the Academy are eligible to vote for Best Picture and the four Actor Awards. Awards for directing, editing, photography and other awards are voted for by the corresponding directors, editors, photography and other branch members. The remaining animated films, documentaries and foreign language films are nominated by members of certain branches. Most notably, the Outstanding British Film Awards and the Best British Debut Awards are nominated and voted on by a jury, and most of the members of the Academy are not eligible to participate.
Doubts about the British Academy Film Awards "Too White" have not been the first time, and many people outside the award ceremony in 2016 have demonstrated to protest that the awards are "too white"
Compared with the current selection mechanism of the Oscars, it is not difficult to find that the biggest difference between the two may be in the four actor units, the United Kingdom is that everyone can vote for the nomination list, and the United States is limited to the Oscar actors and judges. The nomination results for the British Academy Film Award for all-white actors may be related to this.
Therefore, last week, some people also took the initiative to give advice to the British Film Institute. Andrew Chowns, president of the Directors UK with more than 7,000 members, proposed that from the next session onwards, the preliminary selection stage of all units should be judged by a jury system. He first criticized the official statement of the British Film Institute as a perfunctory statement, "I think the points they discussed are actually nonsense." It's all clichés, what to train more female directors, more opportunities for non-white directors to shoot blockbusters. I admit that this is true, but it is not the point. Because, this year, there are actually a lot of good films for female directors to choose, I think "Little Women" is good, why don't they choose? So, I think the problem is with their voting mechanism. Every year in December, the judges have accumulated sixty or seventy DVDs to watch. Supposedly, they should all read it all and then vote. But December is the busiest time of the year for those of us, let alone Christmas. I believe that many judges simply don't have time to watch these films, and the result is only to pick and choose. In other words, you will definitely see the works of famous directors first, so Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino will definitely be nominated. ”
Therefore, Andrew Seans proposed that a jury of representatives should be found to pre-screen these films in order to reduce the burden of watching the rest of the film. After they hand over the nomination list, all 6,700 members will vote for the final election. In this way, the burden of watching dozens of hundreds of movies has been reduced to only a dozen movies. As for the composition of these judges, Andrew Seans said: "The Academy should be carefully screened to be the most representative, and the representatives who have been selected must also understand in their hearts that they have a responsibility to hand over a list of nominations with differences." ”
In the next step, whether the British Film Institute will adopt this suggestion of his, we can only wait and see. To be fair, this jury system will certainly be greatly reduced in participation compared with the original one-person-one-vote system, and even have some possibilities of black-box operations. After all, whether the results given are unsatisfactory or incorrect, the nomination list of pure white actors today at least reflects the real ideas of the 6,700 mainstays of the British film industry. It seems that the British Film Institute should still learn from the Oscars, start from the composition of the membership, and accelerate its process of rejuvenation and diversification (the British Film Institute has never disclosed the gender, age, and ethnic distribution of its members, while the Host of the Oscars, the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, has added many women and minority members in recent years), perhaps this is the way to fundamentally reverse the "too white".