baftas
Sharon Stone Slaps ‘Slumdog’ Star In Red-Carpet Mating Ritual
4:36AM STV | It looked innocent enough, but now we hear that the loving, open-handed greeting Sharon Stone bestowed Sunday night on BAFTA-nominated Slumdog Millionaire star Dev Patel had “cougar attack” written all over it.
BAFTA Winner Mickey Rourke One Gulp Closer To Oscar Glory
2:57AM STV | Mickey Rourke put some Oscar-race distance between himself and Sean Penn last night, winning the British Academy Awards’ Best Actor prize before ceremonially washing it down backstage with a bottle of Champagne. More »
Now It’s Just Getting Ridiculous: ‘Slumdog’ Sweeps BAFTA Awards
1:50AM STV | As the last awards stopover for two weeks before the Oscars, the Orange British Academy Film Awards could have made things fun by rejecting Slumdog Millionaire just for the hell of it. Oh well. More »
British Academy Award Nominations Couldn’t Care Less About The British
4:15AM STV | As we navigate the jaded doldrums of mid-awards season, let’s pause a moment to give the BAFTAs some credit for spiking its 2008 awards nominations with some counterintuitive, even self-loathing surprise. More »
The Father Of Reality Tv Rails Against The Monster His Child Has Become; Has Not Read ‘Frankenstein’ Recently
10:36AM Clem Bastow | Interesting little bit of “industry” drama happening in the UK at the moment: Paul Watson, who is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and producer who, it’s generally accepted, invented the reality television format with his documentaries The Family – and one we’ll all remember – Sylvania Waters, won a special BAFTA on the weekend for Outstanding Contribution to Television.
In his acceptance speech, he took a moment to open up a pretty amazing spray on the topic of reality TV (particularly gutsy considering he has made reality television, more or less, even if his efforts were a little higher up the viewing food-chain than Laddette To Lady or Wife Swap), calling it “sneering” and branding Simon Cowell a “bully”.
Here are some highlights from his op-ed piece in the Mail explaining his harsh words:
With fly-on-the-wall series like The Family (about the working class Wilkins who lived in Reading) and Sylvania Waters (about a raucous family who lived in a suburb of Sydney), I tried to show life as it was lived, warts and all.
My accounts were socio-political, unlike today’s shows, which are just circuses.
With my shows, I can even make some claim to have invented the idea of “reality TV”, but I no longer recognise what goes under that name.
Where I hoped then to inform, today, trashy, modern reality TV seeks merely to titillate, shock and gain notoriety by brutalising and denigrating its subjects. That is the extent of its intellectual vigour.
More » Australian Does Not Win International Award; Military Action Encouraged Against Uk For Ruining Our Party
11:00AM Clem Bastow | If there’s one Australian media tendency (aside from Angela Bishop continuing to be employed) that really gets to us time and time again, it’s this odd obsession our press has with Australians being nominated for awards, and – inevitably – not winning them, and the accompanying moaning and wailing.
The latest installment in this curiously jingoistic journalistic trend is today’s mopey piece from News Ltd on the topic of Cate Blanchett not winning in either of her BAFTA categories.
Blanchett was up for two gongs at the British Academy Film Awards (BAFTAs) – leading actress for her starring role as Queen Elizabeth 1 in Elizabeth: The Golden Age and best supporting actress for her portrayal of music legend Bob Dylan in the acclaimed biopic I’m Not There.
The Academy Award winning actress had been a hot favourite to take out the supporting actress prize, but lost out to Tilda Swinton for her role as a workaholic lawyer in the thriller Michael Clayton.
The 38-year Australian, who is pregnant with her third child, also missed out on the best actress award which went to Marion Cotillard for her portrayal of the revered but troubled French singer Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose.
That froggy bitch, she made Our Cate cry!
Every year at awards season – whether it’s the Oscars, Globes, BAFTAs, Tonys or the frigging Nobel Peace Prize – our press wets itself over our “special” arty people, revving themselves up so that in all but the most exceptional circumstances they are headed for a fall.
The darker side of this is the implication that in not winning, our nominated expats have in some way ‘failed’ us. Plenty of Australian athletes (for example) fail dismally all over the world, but that is apparently a worthy struggle against the odds; actors, musicians and other creative exports were lucky to be allowed to join the international party, but should probably look into a real job, etc etc.
Now, we love Our Cate as much as the best of them, and her I’m Not There performance was memorable (not so sure about The Golden Age…), but as inconceivable as it may be to True Blue™ papers like the News Ltd stable, we actually care who does win these awards, because – as shocking as it may seem – we actually watch films that don’t feature Australian actors, actresses and artisans, too!
To continue to lead into stories in this fashion is to grossly underestimate the Australian public’s cultural IQ. More » 
Baftas Crazy In Love With ‘Atonement’
6:24AM Mark | · Like Mr. Tumnus having his way with Keira Knightly in a darkened family library, the BAFTAs make sweet, desperate love to Atonement, lavishing 14 nominations on the film; runners-up No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood (nine nods each), like adolescents wandering in on the lovers in mid-thrust, stare with a mix of jealousy and immature incomprehension at the act of carnality unfolding in front of them. (We now end this incredibly labored run of Atonement analogies.) [Variety] Breakout Juno star Ellen Page entrusts her red-hot career to first-time director Drew Barrymore, with Page taking a role as a roller-derby-playing “alterna-teen” (no need to stretch too far coming off a hit) in Whip It! [Variety] More »
