Trust BAFTA to make this bizarre awards season even crazier!
Monday, January 25, 2021 at 10:27PM
NATHANIEL R in BAFTA, Oscars (20), Oscars (21), precursor awards

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. 

Article originally appeared on The Film Experience (http://thefilmexperience.net/).
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