“The award needs to be robust, authentic and properly set up, and it also needs to be reflective of BAFTA values to champion the screen arts and support talent from whatever community, particularly those that are underrepresented,” said Jane Millichip, the chief executive of BAFTA. Speaking in a joint video call with Anna Higgs, the chair of BAFTA’s film committee, Millichip said that an award bestowed by popular choice complimented BAFTA’s traditional peer-to-peer voting method, in which only BAFTA members vote on the nominees and winners.
“The public is a really essential component in this relationship, because it’s important that we support developing talent, that we support independent film, that we also celebrate populist, big commercial films as well. There’s a balance to be had here, which is around embracing the full panoply of the cultural landscape,” she said.
While British film fans select the winner of the EE Rising Star Award, the nominees for the prize are not popularly chosen. In October, a panel of film industry members and journalists put forth names for a contender list (not made public), which was whittled down to five nominees by a BAFTA-appointed jury. According to Brooks, that fact that the public is shut out of this process is a crucial element of the prize, and may serve to forestall criticism about it as purely a people’s choice award.
“You’re throwing a bone to the old guard of BAFTA,” he said. “There’s a kind of quality control going on, and only then do you turn it over to the public vote,” he added.
The current jury includes last year’s winner of the prize, Mia McKenna-Bruce, who starred in 2023’s “How To Have Sex,” the director Molly Manning Walker’s feature debut about 16-year-old girls partying on a Greek island. The film, which won the Un Certain Regard Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, was a small, independent project, which made McKenna-Bruce’s win in a popularly voted category particularly impressive. (Compare that with McAvoy, whose highest-profile role before being named a Rising Star at the 2006 ceremony was Mr. Tumnus in the film adaptation of “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”)
Content Source: www.nytimes.com