By Maria Bregman
It was raining on Sunday, which is basically the only tradition the British Academy manages to uphold with any real consistency. The 79th BAFTAs happened in London. The Prince and Princess of Wales were there, smiling through the damp. Alan Cumming was hosting, doing his best to inject some theatrical anarchy into a room full of people who were mostly just worrying about their post-ceremony dinner reservations.
I remember sitting in the press pen a few years back, freezing my toes off, thinking the whole awards circus was about to collapse under the weight of its own irrelevance. This year felt different somehow. Less desperate, maybe. But definitely more predictable.
Look at the big winner. Paul Thomas Anderson took home seven bronze masks for One Battle After Another, including Best Film and Best Director. He also grabbed Best Adapted Screenplay. The film took Cinematography and Editing, too. Oh, and Sean Penn won Best Supporting Actor for it. It was a sweep. A total, unapologetic rout.
At first, I thought this was just BAFTA trying to align itself with the American Academy, trying to predict the Oscars so they look relevant in the Monday morning papers. But then I looked closer at the voting demographics. Actually, scrap that. It’s not about predicting the Oscars. It’s about comfort.
One Battle After Another is a massive, sprawling, expensive American picture starring Leonardo DiCaprio. It looks like cinema used to look before everything got green-screened to death. The voters didn’t vote for it because it’s revolutionary. They voted for it because it feels safe. It feels like a warm bath of 1990s auteur worship. It makes the people clicking the boxes on their secure screener portals feel like they are protecting the sanctity of the medium.
But what does that actually mean on the ground? It means we get a very polished, very masculine sweep.
Anyway, the acting categories offered a bit more texture. Jessie Buckley won Best Actress. I’m not going to complain about that. Buckley is incapable of giving a bad performance. She could read the back of a shampoo bottle and make you cry. She’s a local favourite, but she earns it every time she steps on a set. Robert Aramayo taking Best Actor was a quieter moment, but a solid one. It lacked the flashy, explosive PR narrative of the American winners, which is usually what BAFTA does best when it wants to assert its own identity.
Then we get to the horror of it all. Literally.
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners walked away with three awards. Best Original Screenplay, Original Score, and Best Supporting Actress for Wunmi Mosaku.
This is the part of the night that actually woke me up. The British Academy hates horror. They usually treat it like something you stepped in on the pavement. If a horror film gets nominated, it’s usually relegated to the technical categories. Makeup. Sound. Maybe Visual Effects if someone’s head exploded nicely.
But giving Coogler the Original Screenplay award? Giving Mosaku the acting prize? That might be a sign that the voters are finally getting tired of the same old historical biopics. Or maybe they just realised that Sinners had enough studio money behind it to qualify as “respectable” trauma. Either way, Mosaku holding that mask was the best image of the night. She’s been grinding away in the British and American television trenches for years. Seeing her get industry validation for a genre film is genuinely satisfying.
The technical awards did exactly what you expected them to do. Frankenstein took Costume Design and Make Up & Hair. Avatar: Fire and Ash took Special Visual Effects. Zootropolis 2 took Animation. It’s a bit like ticking off a shopping list. Did the film have blue aliens? Give it the computer award. Did it have corsets and some fake blood? Give it the clothes award.
But the real friction of the night, the decision that I can’t quite stop thinking about, happened in the Documentary category.
We had Mstyslav Chernov’s 2000 meters to Andriivka up against David Borenstein’s Mr. Nobody vs. Putin. Chernov’s film is a raw, terrifying, on-the-ground look at the Ukrainian frontline. It’s mud and blood and survival. Borenstein’s film is about Russian state propaganda being fed into a primary school, told from the perspective of a single teacher trying to navigate the system.
BAFTA gave it to Borenstein.
I’ve spoken to a few voting members over the last couple of weeks. When you bring up the documentary category, they tend to look at their shoes. The thing is, watching frontline war footage on a Tuesday evening after work is exhausting. The voters are tired. So they opted for the psychological horror of propaganda over the physical horror of the trenches.
It’s an interesting choice, but a slightly evasive one. Voting for a documentary about how propaganda works in a classroom, while entirely ignoring the film about the actual war that propaganda is funding, is a bit like arguing about the plumbing bill while your kitchen is actively flooding. It’s an intellectual exercise. It allows the viewer to feel politically engaged without having to look at a dead body.
I don’t know if I agree with the decision, but it tells you exactly where the head of the British film industry is right now. They want to observe the fire from a safe, analytical distance. They don’t want the smoke in their eyes.
So, what do we take away from all this?
The 2026 BAFTAs weren’t a disaster, but they weren’t exactly a revelation either. They did what they were supposed to do. They gave Paul Thomas Anderson his flowers. They gave the Royals a reason to wear nice clothes. They kept the lights on at the Festival Hall.
But you have to wonder if, in their desperate scramble to remain a serious precursor to the Oscars, they’ve lost a bit of their own nerve. When you look at the slate of films that actually got made in Britain this year, the weird, scrappy, difficult films that didn’t have massive Hollywood marketing budgets behind them, you realise how narrow the BAFTA vision has become.
They’re picking the people they hope will validate their own good taste. It makes you wonder if they are voting for the films they actually loved, or just the films they felt they were supposed to respect.
