Stop all this silly hysteria…Brits aren’t sexist and Bafta isn’t racist
POMPOUS Steve McQueen is threatening to boycott the Baftas because of a lack of diversity in this year’s nominations – despite previously winning two of them himself and being nominated for a further three.
“After a while you get a bit fed up with it,” the 12 Years A Slave director groaned to the Guardian this week, warning the gongs risked becoming irrelevant (unless he’s nominated, presumably).
But here’s a fact you won’t have read in the mainstream media over the past week: The Bafta nominations were not racist.
Neither was the Oscars shortlist.
And by the way, the Brits male- dominated list wasn’t sexist either.
Let me explain.
I’ve been an expert on these awards bashes for the past two decades and it’s almost impossible to skew the results.
Art is highly subjective, so the nominations are voted on by various industry bodies that are made up of an increasingly diverse mix of industry experts.
With the Oscars, for example, you have directors voting for directors, actors voting for actors and so on.
SMALL NUMBER OF VOTES
No one was complaining when that system saw Moonlight — a film about a closeted gay black man, with an incredibly diverse cast — triumph over the very white, very mainstream La La Land in the unforgettable 2017 upset.
Many of these decisions come down to a very small number of votes.
Take the Best Actress category this year. The Academy and Bafta went for four out of five of the same women who were all widely tipped to be nominated: favourite Renee Zellweger for Judy, alongside Saoirse Ronan for Little Women, Charlize Theron for Bombshell and Scarlett Johansson for Marriage Story.
The final spot was a toss-up between a pair of highly accomplished newcomers.
In the end, at Bafta there were more votes for Irish success story Jessie Buckley for Wild Rose. While the Academy — hurrah — picked a rising star from London, Cynthia Erivo for Harriet, who just so happens to be black.
Both actresses were equally worthy and by all accounts the decision was a close call. Racist in any way? Absolutely not.
Both the Oscars and Baftas are being criticised for the lack of a female director on the shortlist.
But the main contender, Greta Gerwig — a former Bafta and Oscar nominee — was responsible for a remake of the classic novel Little Women.
No offence, but it’s not a particularly groundbreaking film, compared to, for example, Sam Mendes’ World War One masterpiece 1917, which was directed to look like one continuous shot.
SILLY PLAN
The hysteria around diversity reached farcical levels this week when the US GQ columnist Sophia Benoit criticised 1917 — the greatest war movie ever made, in my opinion — for its lack of female characters.
She added: “I f***ing get that there weren’t many women in the trenches. The question is why does that story keep getting told?”
Perhaps to teach snowflake idiots like her the reality of war.
Thank goodness Brit Awards bosses didn’t go through with their silly plan to go genderless to appeal to a PC minority.
Without any marquee British female singers releasing music this year, there were all-male nominees in the prestigious Best Group and Best Album categories, given the return of critically acclaimed superstars like Coldplay, Stormzy and Harry Styles.
Which means if they had dropped the female categories in time for next month’s ceremony, the Brits might have looked like an all-out sausage party.
So I make a plea: Stop looking for sexism and racism or any other type of phobia in every awards ceremony shortlist ever released and let art be judged as art.
Otherwise we’ll end up with patronising solutions like quotas.
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