By The 2021 awards season is continuing its ongoing existential crisis as it hurtles towards its (inevitable anti)climax. With most ceremonies following the Oscars and shifting the dates back due to the pandemic, to allow more films to compete, we now find ourselves in an awards season with no plot as each ceremony tries to work out what on earth they are meant to be celebrating in a year we all want to forget.
Today's announcement of the 2021 Bafta nominations is so different to what we saw competing at the Golden Globes last month that it's hard to imagine which way the Oscars will go. Do they reward old school Hollywood or powerful indie contenders? Should they gun for diversity and prove they really mean it this year? Do they ever really mean it?
The Golden Globes voters took one look at the Black Lives Matter protests and said, "not near our lawn furniture thanks!", under-nominating several major Black ensemble films. Though Chadwick Boseman and Daniel Kaluuya won major acting awards on the night, it didn't do enough to dispel the feeling that, as Kaluuya said in his (accidentally muted) acceptance speech: "you did me dirty". Perhaps the most telling moment from the ceremony, and the only narrative we will likely see replicated elsewhere, was Chloé Zhao's win for Nomadland in a directing category packed with women, for once.
The Bafta 2021 nominations are a huge shift towards more diversity, with four women nominated in the best director category, and a significant swing toward non-white actors. This means that names like Daniel Kaluuya, Riz Ahmed, Dominique Fishback, Tahar Rahim and Bukky Bakray are among the 16 nominees from ethnic minority backgrounds in the acting categories. Meanwhile household names like Carey Mulligan, Amanda Seyfried, Sacha Baron Cohen, Olivia Colman, Glenn Close and Gary Oldman all missed out.
There's also the added complication with the Baftas that several of the films with multiple nominations, like Minari, Nomadland and Promising Young Woman, are still to be released in this country thanks to cinemas still being shut. It's hard to remember which ones came out nine months ago and which aren't even out yet because time is now meaningless. How can we be expected to choose the best film of the last 12 months when we're hard-pressed to figure out what month it actually is right now?
The release date confusion left the door open to Bafta saying this was the year they were going all out for British films, and while some of them have made the list, others have been relegated to the confusing British Film category. Bafta wants Saint Maud, His House, and Rocks recognised, but they also want the star power of Frances McDormand's tentpole drama and Carey Mulligan' rape revenge fable. The result of having your cake and eating it too is a nominations list that is impossible to decipher. This could lead to a genuinely exciting evening where for once we have no idea who is going to win, but there is the creeping feeling that this awards season feels like as much of a jumbled, postponed, incoherent mess as everything else.
Each awards season has its cast: normally there is a clear boring favourite, a villain we want literally anything else to beat and an underdog we want to go on about to make sure everyone knows we simply love arthouse cinema. David Fincher's old Hollywood ode Mank had a hint of being this year's villain, but it keeps being nominated without winning much, so it's hard to get too cross. Especially when Fincher is taking his Ls with Mankian bonhomie. Nothing feels like it really has the momentum or can inspire anyone to muster much outrage this year. Normally by this stage we'd have a clear front-runner coming into the final furlong. Instead it feels like a version of the Grand National with the horses and the jockeys running alongside each other, where the winner is just whoever makes it to the finish line alive.
Will the Oscars go the way of the Baftas and champion diversity, leaving the Golden Globes looking terribly behind the times? Even beyond the mess of selecting nominees, how does anyone pick a winner in such a confused, underwhelming year, in which nothing has dominated the conversation or piqued excitement quite like Parasite did last year? The Baftas might have done some overdue work in catching up to 2021, but don't be surprised if the Oscars give us a Hollywood ending to this hard-to-follow awards season. That is to say: predictable, disappointing, and overall as white as ever.
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