From our Swindon Correspondent:
From The Times
The Duke of Cambridge is understood to have privately expressed his concerns to the chief executive of Bafta about the lack of diversity in this year’s awards shortlist.
Prince William, the president of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts since 2010, will attend the awards ceremony tonight in central London, alongside Hollywood stars from Brad Pitt to Scarlett Johansson.
He is expected to use his speech to criticise the lack of black, Asian and minority ethnic actors in the leading four acting categories. No women were shortlisted for the best director award.
Well, the problem here is precisely that they’re minorities. That means that when you’ve got 20 places, and 12% of the US population is black, 2.4 of the candidates should be black. But that’s never going to be a consistent 2 or 3 average. Some years your’re going to get a lot less. As long as you also get years with more than that too, you’re doing fine. In 2015 and 2016, 40% of the nominees for best actor were ethnic minorities.
And last year was quite a bad film for critically acclaimed films with black actors. In previous years, you had films like Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, Get Out.
So, the question is who the Duke thinks should have been nominated?
And Bafta is the BRITISH film awards, so there “should be” 1 black nominee, and variability “should” give you between 3 and minus 1.
So, the question is who the Duke thinks should have been nominated? And herein lies the problem. If they handed out awards to the films that had pleased the public this wouldn’t be a problem because as they’d have a benchmark, people paying with their hard earned cash. Instead its become an industry circle jerk based on their own biases, which often bear little of no relation to what the public thinks or likes. They may as well set up a quota system and award prizes to all like an infant school sports day and have done with it for… Read more »
@BiND
“pleased the public” like:
“Fugitive of the Judoon” – Doctor Who’s most stunning and brave episode ever
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_-hqqcS_xg
/sarc
What does he think about the lack of white sprinters?
> So, the question is who the Duke thinks should have been nominated?
Everyone one who identifies as having a melanin-enhanced vagina, obvs.
What about the lack of diversity in track events, US basketball, and Bollywood movies?
So if the selection is totally unbiased, non-racist, non-misogynistic, whatever, and just picks the best five in each category, would the selection have looked any different your highness?
Or is your concern that whoever is doing he selecting is picking the best when they should be ensuring diversity?
The British royal family seems to number about 20 pairings. All white-on-white, cis on cis. Genetically it’s 3 times as valid to describe Princess Meghan as white as not-white so we’ll include her. So who in the House of Windsor is going to lift their shirt, and bend over to get the diversity quota up.
Frankly I’d rather the Royals did the minority thing of sticking together, getting better than Bs at A-level, that sort of thing and that films were worth seeing for being good stories well told.
@Mr TW
You write about USA not UK population in article about
British Academy of Film and Television Arts awards – why?