Trust BAFTA to make this bizarre awards season even crazier!
Monday, January 25, 2021 at 10:27PM 
BAFTA has made a strange decision. Despite more than enough movies to justify an awards season (as you can see from the numerous critics awards we've already witnessed... many of which weren't considering January/February releases like Oscar and the Globes are), BAFTA now just opened to the window for even more films to play. They're saying that as long as you already had a release date planned before April 9th in the UK, you can be eligible for their current award season and just delay your actual release until any point in 2021.
This is an administrative nightmare. Or, at least it's a nightmare for those of us who enjoy things like calendars, time, seasons, and Things That Make Sense.
It also begs the question of what groups like the Globes, SAG, BAFTA, and the Academy are going to do for next year's awards (do all of these awards bodies think the world is going to end in 2021)...
At this rate next year's awards shows, honoring the films of 2021, will have even less titles to choose from than 2020 provided! For the 94th Oscars, the new film year will only be 10 months long and for BAFTA the new film year will conceivably be only about 7 months. This probably sounds horribly confusing but in short these institutions are letting 2020 bleed so far into 2021 that 2021 will just barely be getting started by the time the clock strikes 2022 and it's time to honor whatever just happened.
Next summer, fall, and winter in British movie theaters might conceivably have weekends wherein some of the new titles were eligible "last year" and some are eligible the following year even though they literally have twin release dates. MADNESS.
It really would have been smarter for the major awards bodies to just either a) stick to the normal easy-to- understand January-December calendar and let things play out in whatever sad pandemic way they might OR b) skip the party altogether due to the pandemic and have two years worth of movies to choose from this time next year.
Reader Comments (21)
Ugh.
I blame this on Oscar. Shoulda stuck to the calendar year. Not sure how adding two months of streaming movies (when everything is streaming anyway) made up for the lack of in-person screenings.
The Oscars could also "split the difference" gradually, so there are no 9- or 10-month eligibility periods.
Films of 2020. January 2020 through February 2021 = 13 months.
Films of 2021. March 2021 through January 2022 = 11 months
Films of 2022. February 2022 through December 2022 = 11 months.
Films of 2023. January through December 2023. Back to normal = 12 months.
@Marcos- that sounds like the best option
Such a fuss.
When was the last time the Oscars seriously paid attention to a film released before June?
BAFTA has a long history of honoring films based on their UK release date. Many years show Oscar winners at BAFTA a year later.
Things aren't going to be back to normal until sometime in 2022 (the earliest) in the USA. Plenty of people won't take the vaccine, this is going to stick around here. Not sure about the UK, but the Oscars should have just stayed with films of 2020 only.
@ Marcos:
Actually:
This is totally fucked up. To me, it should always be a 12-month period to celebrate the year. From January 1 to December 31. No exceptions.
James, has it happened since Halle Berry, though?
TheDtMistery - Charlize Theron for Monster - there was a general unspoken rule that if you won the Oscar without a UK release, you grabbed a BAFTA nomination the following year. Hasn’t happened since then, as far as I’m aware. Recently, any studio with legitimate buzz will force through their release in the UK to ensure eligibility - Sandra Bullock (in a film that really wouldn’t appeal to BAFTA) is the last winner to miss a UK qualifying release, I believe (and she didn’t get an afterglow citation in 2010)...
I imagine this decision is just an opportunity to encompass more of the 2020 Oscar films, than it is to cut in on 2021 films. As it stands, cinemas aren't open at all here in the UK and films like NOMADLAND, MINARI and SOUND OF METAL (to name just three that I've been waiting on for ages!) aren't going to come out here until March - and possibly even later, with no streaming plans for some reason - so I suppose BAFTA doesn't want to be late to the party and nominate them next year.
Argh! BAFTA - a perennial embarrassment to my country during awards season. I don’t know what’s worse, their usual inclination to ape every move the Oscars make or thinking for themselves and making utterly baffling decisions such as this?!
Awards attention or not, releasing a movie in 2020-2021 is unwise. I get why all the studios have delayed. All of them are coming and going with no one caring. Now they have to fight for awards scraps.
Well this make things even more weird.
I think we are doing slightly better regards Vaccines than the USA but we ar e a smaller country,hopefully the latest President can speed things up for the good of his people.
Let’s imagine Oscar reverts to the cutoff of December 31 this year. In that scenario, many films released in Q1 2021 will have been accounted for in *this* awards cycle. So yes it’s a shortened year.
But, if those dates were mapped onto a previous “normal” year, how many nominees would be erased? My guess is not many at all. The Oscars already ignore Q1. Can’t speak for BAFTA, but Oscar can break this pattern whenever it wants without affecting the nominees much at all.
Geez Louise. Calendar releases, Jan-Dec, would be the best. Also, just release everything GLOBALLY on the SAME freaking day, streaming or not.
I mean, I already have to wait until Feb to see NOMADLAND cuz I'm not a critic. And I have to wait until Feb to see Russell T Davies' new show, It's a Sin. Come on, this is killing me!
I'm wondering what the TV film category will be like at the Emmys cause the Oscar rules said anything that's streaming can be up for Oscars basically.
Who are they trying to cheat? The "biggest" award organizations it end sticking to the same 12 to 20 title films that are repeated in the different categories.
If they do this pretending to show that they want to have a more diversity of films to be considered is not believable.
Also, the BAFTAs have better taste than the Oscars time and time again. Pfeiffer, Weaver, Benning, Jake Gyllenhaal, Scarlett Johansson—all BAFTA winners. I'll let them do their thing.
JW -- the solution, it seems to me, is to make all singular story films, "movies" and anything longer than that TV. The TV movie category has been dying a slow death anyway. It's very out of fashion and they dont have much to choose from each year. If streaming is how all stories will arrive to us now, and the styles and equipment of filmmaking which used to be different have already mostly fused, that's the only way i see to make a clear distinction between films and television