BAFTAs debacle

So The Full Monty is the best film of the year, according to last Sunday night's BAFTA awards jury. Better than its fellow nominees, L.A. Confidential and Titanic, if you can swallow that. Better than William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, even though BAFTA thought it was the best directed film of the year. And even better than Nil By Mouth, which beat The Full Monty in the BAFTA award for best British film of the year.

The crowning of The Full Monty, an entertaining but wildly over-praised yarn, with four BAFTA awards including best film of the year, raises questions not about the film itself but about the whole BAFTA system. How were Titanic, The Ice Storm, TwentyFourSeven and Boogie Nights eligible for nominations when they were early 1998 releases in Britain? Why, then, was Romeo + Juliet, an early 1997 release in Britain, not eligible for last year's awards? Does BAFTA seriously think it is making some kind of grand statement by snubbing Titanic, which had 10 nominations and went home empty-handed? If that is the price of success, James Cameron is unlikely to have sleepless nights over it.

And why does BAFTA not go all the way and restrict its nominations to British films, instead of having a token American nominated in each of the acting categories, as happened again this year? The annual French cinema awards, the Cesars, works perfectly well as an all-French awards ceremony with one award for best foreign-language film. The only American actor to win a BAFTA this year was Sigourney Weaver as best supporting actress for The Ice Storm - but she simply had to win, given that her opposition amounted to Jennifer Ehle and Zoe Wanamaker for their forgettable roles in Wilde, and Lesley Sharp, who had a minor part in The Full Monty. To cap it all, as his impersonations of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton proved, the ceremony's compere Rory Bremner is no Billy Crystal. There was one good thing about this year's BAFTA ceremony - the decision to present the Michael Balcon Award for Outstanding Contribution to Cinema to the excellent and unassuming camera operator, Mike Roberts, who has 114 movies to his credit and was paid due tribute on the night by Alan Parker, Liam Neeson and Neil Jordan.

The UCD telephone system came under heavy pressure last Monday afternoon when applications opened for the Martin Scorsese public interview at the Savoy on May 9th. Over 1,300 calls were taken in just two and a half hours, with the result that very many people were disappointed. All tickets have now been allocated and there is no prospect of any last-minute availability.

UCD Film School, which is organising Scorsese's visit to Dublin, has asked us to point out that the interview at the Savoy on May 9th will be Scorsese's only public appearance in Dublin and that he will not be present for tomorrow's screening of his documentary, A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies at UCD.

The delightful Calista Flockhart, star of the engaging US TV series, Ally McBeal (which finally returned to Network 2 last night after a month off the air), has joined the cast of Michael Hoffman's film of A Midsummer Night's Dream, now shooting on Italian locations. The film's attractive international cast also features Kevin Kline, Michelle Pfeiffer, Rupert Everett, Stanley Tucci, Anna Friel, David Strathairn, Sam Rockwell, Sophie Marceau, Dominic West and Christian Bale.

Busy Irish actor Jonathan Rhys-Meyers has joined the cast of Ang Lee's Civil War drama, Ride With The Devil (formerly known as To Live On) which is filming in Kansas City and features Skeet Ulrich, Tobey Maguire and the singer, Jewel. And James Spader joins Angela Bassett and Robert Forster in Walter Hill's science-fiction picture, Supernova, which is filming in Los Angeles, while David Cronenberg has started work on the science-fiction drama, eXistenZ, starring Jude Law and Jennifer Jason Leigh.