Co-host Alison Hammond was the only black person in the winners’ group photo
The 2023 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards have been criticized, after all the awards went to white people.
The prestigious British event featured a diverse group of nominees. People belonging to ethnic minorities made up about 40% of the finalists for the acting awards.
But that did not translate into a win, as the 49 winners in all categories were white.
This comes after three years of protest and subsequent reforms, when all 20 candidates were then white.
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Cate Blanchett and Austin Butler won Best Actress and Actor
Marcus Ryder, director of advisory at the Sir Lenny Henry Center for Media Diversity, said Sunday’s results were “extremely disappointing” and showed there had been “no fundamental change” over the past decade.
He said: “Ten years ago, in 2013, the Lenny Henry Center made headlines at the BAFTA TV Awards when it described it as ‘all white tonight’.”
“Frustratingly, despite the overhaul on which I and many others in the industry have been consulted – which has resulted in 120 changes to BAFTA awards processes, a thousand new members from underrepresented groups etc., the end result is that there is no fundamental change.”
He said the focus should not be on ceremonies like the BAFTAs which are “just the tip of the iceberg” in a wider film industry that “suffers from systemic racism”.
Film and TV critic and BAFTA short film jury member Ashanti Omkar said she felt “very devastated” after watching the ceremony and seeing the group photo of the winners.
She said: “Alison Hammond was the only person in the global majority at that, and she wasn’t a winner but she was working at the event like so many others adding color to the red carpet and playing music and presenting awards. It seemed regressive, and as if this was cosmetically forward rather than real systemic change.
Omkar said all winners deserve prizes, but she worries about whether people are “going back to old voting practices” after progress made in recent years.
“That’s how I felt, and honestly I was sad,” she told the BBC.
Writer and critic Laila Latif wrote in The Guardian that that night, there was “creeping annoyance that the awards were taking advantage of the work and presence of so many people of color without handing them a statuette.”
“By the end of the night, when it was slowly becoming known that all of the winners were white, you could practically feel the BAFTA team’s heads sinking into their hands as they prepared for another social media storm,” she said.
Comedian London Hughes wrote on Twitter: “Anyone who is not white, British, and dreams of a successful career in arts and entertainment, please, I beg you, get your visa and leave the UK.”
BAFTA declined to comment on the lack of diversity among the winners, but pointed to the reforms it adopted in 2020. These reforms included adding more voters with a focus on underrepresented groups, and making voters watch all long-list films in the categories they vote for.
The organisation’s president, Krishnendu Majumdar, told the New York Times ahead of the ceremony that he wanted to “level the playing field”, but that recognition “must be on merit”.
BAFTA chief executive Jane Millichip told the newspaper that the review process would remain ongoing and static and that the 2020 reforms were “not a perfect end station”.
In 2021 and 2022, half of the winning cast were non-white.
Clive Nyonka, who led a study on racial inequality in the UK film industry in 2021, said it would take five or six years to get a full idea of the impact of BAFTA’s changes.
This year, the German-language World War I epic All Quiet on the Western Front was the big winner, with seven awards, while Cate Blanchett and Austin Butler took home the main acting awards.
