BAFTA Rethinks Voting Practices

This story from Variety takes a look at BAFTA’s current voting process and how they might fix it going forward. The BAFTAs are a week from now:

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.