This year's BAFTA nominations will raise some questions about the org's complex voting process, particularly the role of its specialist chapters.
The first round of voting, which involves the whole membership, produces a longlist of 15 candidates in each section (five asterisked as the choice of the relevant chapter for each category, such as acting or sound, and 10 selected by the BAFTA membership at large). This year, the nominations, which come from the second round of voting, mirror the chapter preferences in all but four cases. In other words, 75 out of 79 nominations matched the chapter vote.
BAFTA introduced chapter voting only in the past couple of years, with the intention of drawing attention to otherwise overlooked talent. But there's concern in BAFTA circles that the chapters have started to exert a distorting influence over the final outcome. BAFTA officials plan to conduct a detailed review of how the chapter system is working after this year's awards.
In the meantime, the areas where the membership vote does diverge from the chapters offer a clue about which film has the greatest BAFTA support. Neither Dev Patel nor Freida Pinto were among the five picked by the acting chapter, but the membership voted to nominate them nonetheless (Patel replaced Michael Sheen in lead actor, and Pinto pipped Viola Davis in supporting actress). That establishes "Slumdog Millionaire" as the clear favorite for the film prize, which, like the four acting awards, is chosen by the whole membership.
In the animation category, the membership inserted "Waltz With Bashir" as a nominee to replace "Kung Fu Panda," which was preferred by the animators' chapter. But because in this case, the chapter alone votes for the final winner, "Bashir" is unlikely to beat the other two nominees, "Wall-E" and "Persepolis."
In the editing section, a tied vote resulted in six nominees instead of the usual five -- comprising the chapter choices ("Changeling," "Dark Knight," "Frost/Nixon," "In Bruges" and "Slumdog") plus "Benjamin Button." That testifies to strong membership support for "Button" in general, but again, with the chapter choosing the winner, "Button" looks to be the outsider in this category.
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