Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Million Dollar Baby
Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Un long dimanche de fiançailles / A Very Long Engagement, Bill Condon's Kinsey, and Alexander Payne's Sideways have been shortchanged by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts' new rules.
The aforementioned films were officially eligible for the 2004 BAFTA awards, but Sideways only managed to get one nomination for its screenplay, Un long dimanche de fiançailles received one nod in the Best Foreign Language Film category, while Million Dollar Baby and Kinsey were completely ignored.
The problem is that several potential contenders for the BAFTA Awards have just been released in the United Kingdom, or they are yet to be released in that country.
Since the BAFTAs are now one more precursor to the Oscars — that's the British Academy's way to garner more worldwide publicity for its awards — new rules state that movies released in the UK as late as March are eligible for the previous year's awards. But now that the BAFTA awards ceremony takes place before Oscar night, votes for the BAFTA nominees must be in by early January. As a result, there is little time for voters to catch up with the latest (or upcoming) releases.
A dearth of both special screenings and screeners of several important films have resulted in fewer votes for movies that otherwise might have been top contenders.
According to journalist Brian Pendreigh in The Scotsman, BAFTA voters received a mere 25 DVDs out of all the films that were eligible for the awards. Pendreigh goes on to say that "even as the BAFTA ceremony reaches new heights of glamour and prestige, the failure to make sure that voters at least get a chance to see the best films is turning the awards into a farce."