Biases And Weirdnesses: The BAFTA Longlist For 2012

If your name’s not on the list, then you’re not going to win.

BAFTA have published their full longlist of films eligible for consideration in the 2012 awards. You can read the whole thing as a PDF, but here are the key bits.

The candidates for Best Film are:

The Artist
The Descendants
Drive
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Help
Hugo
The Ides of March
The Iron Lady
Midnight in Paris
Moneyball
My Week with Marilyn
Senna
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
War Horse
We Need to Talk About Kevin

And for Best British Film:

Arthur Christmas
Attack the Block
Coriolanus
The Guard
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2
The Iron Lady
Jane Eyre
My Week with Marilyn
Senna
Shame
Submarine
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Tyrannosaur
War Horse
We Need to Talk About Kevin

It can happen that the winner of the Best Film isn’t the winner of Best British Film despite appearing on both lists. That could potentially occur this year with any of My Week With Marilyn, Senna, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, War Horse or We Need To Talk About Kevin. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Tinker Tailor win either or both, so that’s possibly the number one candidate for such confusion.

Such splits seem to suggest different standards are being held for films “British” and “Other”, but that’s probably not the case so much as there being a difference in competition that results in different voting biases. For example, you might think that Tinker Tailor is the best film in List A, but you won’t vote for it in List B because there you have the option of Submarine, your overall preferred film.

Anyhow, isn’t it absurd that some of those are being called British films? War Horse seems the most conspicuously American of them all.

On a happier bent, I’m glad to see 50/50, Bridesmaids and Tyrannosaur on the list for Best Original Screenplay because they do all feature great writing but have been, generally, praised on other grounds.

The Artist seems to have the most mentions. I imagine it’s going to clean up on the night.

There’s only one mention of The Tree of Life and that’s in cinematography. That’s also how I like it.

The most bemusing category, overall, is the special effects one. It seems like they listed everything they can think of that had special effects in and then added on Midnight in Paris, perhaps at random. It surely won’t make it to the nomination stage but how did it even get this far?

It’s also the one category that should be Case Closed right now, I think, because while Rise of the Planet of the Apes doesn’t have the consistently great FX we were promised it definitely ascends higher than any of its competition.

This year’s ceremony falls on Sunday 12th February. Before that, the nominations will be revealed on Tuesday 17th, and before that, the nominations for the public-voted category, the Orange Rising Star award, will be announced this Wednesday morning.