Analysis: Nostalgia wins ahead of real challenging art at BAFTAs

Nostalgia is the order of the day when it comes to this year’s BAFTA awards. What does this say? Mostly that BAFTA voters aren’t always the most forward-thinking bunch, especially with Andy Serkis’s pioneering motion-capture work once again given the cold shoulder.

Yes, yes, Best Actor nominee Jean Dujardin’s turn as a silent movie star in The Artist is very charming, but Serkis’s wordless performance as a hyper-intelligent chimp in Rise of the Planet of the Apes was both technically brilliant and emotionally devastating. His failure to even make the long-list is the year’s biggest oversight.

Still, Tinker Tailor’s strong showing isn’t unwelcome. Its status as quality cinema arises from a genuinely artful approach to storytelling, one that doesn’t sacrifice complexity in order to conform to some bland, middle-brow definition of grown-up cinema (something that likely resulted in it being shut out of the nominations for the insipid Golden Globes at the weekend). The nominations have also provided some welcome bids for credibility elsewhere. Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive picked up four nominations; the wondrous documentary Senna has been nominated for Outstanding British Film, and Lynne Ramsay is in the running for Best Director alongside Refn and Tinker Tailor’s talented Swedish helmer, Tomas Alfredson. Sadly the unconscionably bad The Iron Lady picked up four nominations, so, swings and roundabouts...