BRITISH BOOST
BAFTA has unveiled key adjustments for the 2026 movie awards, together with strengthened eligibility standards for Excellent British Movie and refined documentary voting procedures.
The Excellent British Movie class now requires candidates to achieve a minimal of 60% of obtainable factors, with both the director or author being British to qualify. Movies that attain the brink with out British administrators or writers will likely be thought of on enchantment.
For documentaries, BAFTA has refined the opt-in chapter profile to make sure spherical one voting is carried out by members with particular documentary/non-fiction expertise, whereas the complete voting membership will choose the winner.
In one other vital change, full voting members will resolve winners of the British Quick Movie and British Quick Animation classes for the primary time, elevating the profile of those works.
The 79th awards ceremony will happen Feb. 22, 2026, with longlists introduced Jan. 9 and nominations Jan. 27. Entries opened August 14.
Anna Higgs, BAFTA movie committee chair, mentioned the adjustments replicate “our ongoing dedication to recognizing excellence and evolving with the trade.”
THEORY TRIUMPH
The BFI will bestow its highest honor, a BFI Fellowship, on influential filmmaker and educational Laura Mulvey on Nov. 4 at BFI Southbank. The popularity celebrates Mulvey’s 50-year profession and the fiftieth anniversary of her seminal essay “Visible Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which launched the groundbreaking idea of the “male gaze.”
“This extraordinary honor strikes me deeply, not least as a result of it acknowledges movie training, an unique BFI dedication in 1933, by way of its first Fellowship to an educational,” mentioned Mulvey, at present honorary professor of movie at College of St. Andrews. “My work has all the time been collective. If my 1975 essay helped remodel movie research, it was as a result of the feminist motion was driving a wave of political power that demanded new methods of seeing.”
BFI chair Jay Hunt praised Mulvey as “a British pioneer and feminist icon” whose concepts “have helped form cinema and influenced the world.”
The fellowship features a November-December season at BFI Southbank celebrating her scholarship and collaborative movies with Peter Wollen.
