The BAFTA 2025 Winners Fit The Era: Could Have Been Worse

There’s nothing cool about a live awards telecast – the scripted bits, teleprompter dependence, and constant pauses to wait for talent in transit sucks a lot of the snappy pizazz that a night of celebrating artists deserves. Added to this is the fact that British showmanship feels weirdly forced and off-key when it’s scaled up to an Oscar-sized event, combined with British joke writers writing safe quips about American film and internet culture is also lame and the fact that the BAFTA awards aren’t even live so if you’re on social media, you can easily access all the winners an hour or so before they’re announced on your broadcast feed…

Well, it’s not hard to see why BAFTA 2025 is best enjoyed as a series of acceptance speeches with no fluff in between – even if the winners lacked a little imagination.

The BAFTA awards are but a small part of the overall British Academy of Film and Television Arts charity work, but they are the most public. This year confirmed the voting body’s desire to nod along to the most heavily campaigned Oscar picks – every 2025 winner from the acting, directing, screenplay, and Best Film categories is nominated, if not a frontrunner, at the Oscars. After softening the reach of their specialist juries (which were brought in after a year of all white acting nominees), the last couple of years have been business as usual: a more conservative slant on popular Oscar picks inside a cringe-inducing entertainment broadcast.