During a turbulent awards season, the Baftas played it safe
Wildfires. Racist Tweets. Artificial intelligence. The 2025 awards season has been unprecedented, chaotic, and unpredictable. Even without these external scandals, it’s the first year in a long time that the ‘Best Picture’ Oscar hasn’t been locked up for months in advance of the ceremony. But at tonight’s Baftas, in a show of stiff upper lipped-ness, order reigned supreme.
There was plenty of potential for things to go haywire. The ongoing controversy that has engulfed Jacques Audiard’s Spanish-language musical Emilia Pérez after historical social media posts from its star, Karla Sofía Gascón, came to light, has been hanging over awards season for weeks. Gascón made history as the first openly transgender actor to be nominated for ‘Best Actress’ at the Oscars, but when her racist and Islamophobic tweets were unearthed, and she made several ill-conceived attempts at backtracking, the scandal threatened not only her awards prospects but the film’s as well.
Part of the issue was that Emilia Pérez was showered with nominations – 13 at the Oscars and 11 at the Baftas – so no one could ignore the controversy. In the end, the Baftas found a way. Instead of making headlines by shutting the film out of the awards entirely or worse, handing it every award for which it was nominated and pretending nothing happened, the voters went for a modest in-between.
Zoe Saldaña, who has been a frontrunner for the ‘Best Supporting Actress’ award from the beginning, prevailed, and Jacques Audiard accepted the award for ‘Best Film Not in the English Language.’ The Baftas didn’t snub the film, but they didn’t enhance its prospects for the Oscars or willfully ignore the elephant in the room. Both Saldaña and Audiard avoided wall-to-wall headlines by briefly thanking Gascón and moving swiftly along.
The biggest winner came as no surprise. Edward Berger is a Bafta favourite, so when Conclave won four out of 12 nominations, including ‘Best Film,’ it was hardly seismic. Two years ago, Berger’s All Quiet on the Western Front swept the ceremony, coming away with seven awards. If Conclave had dominated, it would have been a talking point since films like The Brutalist and Anora have been scooping up awards elsewhere this season, but both those movies earned their own major category wins, with The Brutalist walking away with ‘Best Director’ for Brady Corbet and ‘Best Leading Actor’ for Adrien Brody, and Anora walking away with ‘Best Leading Actress’ for Mikey Madison.
Another source of potential drama that was deftly sidestepped was the absence of Kneecap’s anti-awards show rhetoric. The Belfast-based hip-hop trio are known for their irreverent criticism of authority, be it the government or the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. When their fictionalised biopic was passed over for an Oscar nomination, the group took to social media to say, “Fuck the Oscars. Free Palestine.” But when director Rich Peppiatt won for ‘Outstanding Debut by a British Writer, Director or Producer,’ neither the band nor their iconoclasm took the stage. Instead, Peppiatt respectfully talked about respecting language, culture, and homeland.
Arguably, the biggest upset of the evening was Madison’s win over Demi Moore, who has so far picked up ‘Best Actress’ awards at the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards. However, Madison’s campaign has been picking up steam in the betting market in recent weeks, so perhaps it’s not all that confusing. Meanwhile, Adrien Brody won the award for ‘Best Leading Actor’ in what was widely regarded as one of the few foregone conclusions of the season.
This awards season has been rocked by several explosive events. Gascón’s fall from grace came shortly after the editor of The Brutalist caused a minor scandal when he revealed that he had used artificial intelligence to alter the accents of Brody and Felicity Jones during scenes when they spoke in Hungarian dialect. Both of those controversies pale in comparison to the devastating wildfires that have turned Los Angeles upside-down and forced multiple events to be cancelled and delayed. The Baftas this evening were a balm or a bore, depending on how you look at it.
So, where does all of this leave us for the Oscars? The truth is, the Baftas have never been as reliable an indicator of where the Academy might land as the various guild awards. All we can surmise from the evening is that Timothée Chalamet probably won’t be singing and dancing his way back to Los Angeles, and a pared-down version at the Baftas hasn’t diluted Moore’s inevitable tear-jerker of an Oscars acceptance speech.
