Why Don’t We Get The BAFTAs Live?

I know that the easy answers are that:
1. the show runs for at least three hours and viewers would get bored, or
2. we can’t trust celebrities not to swear

and there’s a suspcision that
3. but then the after-parties wouldn’t start until post 11pm and that would be terrible.
But as things stand we’re in the worst possible place.
The awards begin in the Royal Opera House at 7pm from what I can tell. Yet the television broadcast begins at 9pm.
In last night’s TV broadcast we had some pretty significant awards cut from coverage, including Outstanding British Contribution to Cinema, Editing, Cinematography and Sound.
Seriously – those are really important awards. What’s more, until we saw the brief catch-up at the end of the programme, we didn’t really know the extent to which The Hurt Locker had cleaned up. That would have made it less suspenseful when the film won Best Film.
But what really doesn’t work in the socially-connected age that we live in, is that knowledge of who’s won comes out as soon as the award is made. Sites are blogging the results, live. Twitter and Facebook are full of the results. The news sites tell you who’s won. It’s pointless. If I so much as strayed online, or onto a news channel, it’d have been a “spoiler.”
If even the BRITS are carried live these days, why can’t something like the BAFTAs?
I suppose we should be thankful for small mercies. Unlike previous years, there were no embarrassing technical glitches that I could see. It does seem a shame that some of our best acting talent can’t give life to a couple of sentences without sounding like robots. I suppose at least Mickey Rourke was honest in this, but Rupert Everett and a couple of the others were appalling. And I think that if the BBC is losing Jonathan Ross elsewhere in the schedule, now would be a good time to give him a rest from the BAFTAs too.
Anyway, even though I’m about the last person in the world still not to have seen Avatar, I’m rather glad that The Hurt Locker won so much as it was excellent.


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