The Bafta Film Award nominations announced today show the US and UK film academies are broadly aligned in their tastes, with similar major titles attracting a breadth of support, and some of the categories looking notably similar in the names nominated.
However, there are also plenty of differences across the two sets of nominations, with Ampas showing a more broadly international flavour – for example, in craft categories – and Bafta voters showing more loyalty to UK films.
Sinners was the most-nominated film at the Oscars, and at the Baftas that honour goes to One Battle After Another with 14 nominations. Bafta voters showed more love to both Hamnet and Marty Supreme with 11 Bafta nominations apiece – compared to eight and nine nods respectively at Oscar. Frankenstein and Sentimental Value (eight Bafta nominations each) have performed very similarly at both sets of awards
A trio of UK films – I Swear, The Ballad Of Wallis Island and Pillion – achieved a combined 11 Bafta nominations and zero at Oscar. (Sony Pictures Classics releases I Swear in the US in April, and it was not eligible at this year’s Oscars. A24 gave Pillion an awards-qualifying run ahead of its official release on February 6. Focus Features released The Ballad Of Wallis Island in the US back in March last year.)
All three achieved Bafta nominations in their respective screenplay categories: original for I Swear, and adapted for The Ballad Of Wallis Island and Pillion.
Global membership
The increasingly international membership of Ampas was reflected in the Oscar nominations, with films predominantly not in English scoring across best film, director, original screenplay, all four acting categories, animated feature, documentary and several craft categories.
Bafta also has a global membership, but not as broadly international as Ampas. Bafta has nominated six male leading actors all speaking English in their films – and best actor Oscar nominee Wagner Moura (The Secret Agent) was not even on Bafta’s longlist of 10.
Ampas and Bafta have one casting nominee each for foreign-language films: respectively The Secret Agent and Sentimental Value.
Ampas has three additional craft categories with an international flavour among the nominees: editing (Sentimental Value), sound (Sirat) and make-up and hair (Kokuho and The Ugly Stepsister). Outside of casting, all of Bafta’s craft nominees are for films in the English language.
Both academies nominated a film predominantly not in English for director (Sentimental Value’s Joachim Trier), and two in original screenplay (Sentimental Value in both, plus It Was Just An Accident for Ampas and The Secret Agent for Bafta).
The five nominees are identical across Oscar’s international feature and Bafta’s film not in the English language categories: It Was Just An Accident, The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value, Sirat and The Voice Of Hind Rajab.
This is a rather remarkable outcome since the eligibility for the two awards is completely different. For Oscar, individual countries submit a film. For Bafta, there is no country submission, and eligibility results from a timely UK theatrical release.
Bafta usually nominates at least one title in the film not in the English-language category that was not submitted by their country to Oscar – All We Imagine As Light last year, Anatomy Of A Fall and Past Lives the year before – and the two sets of nominations have not matched up in more than a decade.
Bafta now has a specialised documentary chapter populated by those with “specific documentary/non-fiction experience”, matching the equivalent Ampas chapter of practitioners. This gave rise to speculation that the nominees in this category would come into closer alignment this year.
In the event, only two films are common among the doc nominees for Ampas and Bafta: The Perfect Neighbor and Mr Nobody Vs Putin. However, there are no celebrity-themed documentaries nominated for Bafta this year, unless you count Cover-Up about investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.
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