I think it’s time for the BBC to “finally axe the snobfest that is the Baftas”, says Dan Wootton in Mail Online. Maybe it’s the pandemic, or the war in Ukraine, but at this year’s event the normal “orgy of self-congratulation” by “out of touch luvvies” was more vulgar than ever. There was actor Benedict Cumberbatch, wearing a blue and yellow badge and earnestly saying how he hopes to take Ukrainian refugees into his home (“hope being the operative word there”). Or host Rebel Wilson, who opened the show with the clanger: “Good evening ladies and gentlemen and gender fluid youth.” And Emma Watson – “one of the woke Harry Potter stars to so shamefully shun JK Rowling, the woman who made them famous” – incomprehensibly blathering on about actors being “brave enough to explore the past because they’re eager to face the future”.
But my biggest problem with the Baftas is that they “don’t give a damn” about the films ordinary Brits love. The latest James Bond took in $774m at the box office but was snubbed in every category in which it was nominated bar one. Meanwhile Jane Campion’s “self-indulgent, boring and pointless” western, The Power of the Dog, won best film. “Unless the Baftas are prepared to enter the real world, the BBC should stop wasting licence fee payers’ money and two hours of Sunday night primetime to broadcast such self-congratulatory nonsense.”