Ahead of this Sunday's awards night, we remember Joanna Lumley's humourless stint at hosting, acrobats dressed as astronauts and the rage of Russell Crowe
Typically, the Baftas have fewer memorable moments than, say, the Oscars. This is partly because the ceremony isn't broadcast live, so viewers are essentially treated to edited highlights. However, when Russell Crowe won for A Beautiful Mind in 2002, it was his speech that got edited out. That was because he decided to recite the Patrick Kavanagh poem Sanctity, and it went on and on. When Crowe realised what had happened, he tracked down the show's director at the afterparty, pinned him against a wall, called him a "cunt" and then allegedly kicked three chairs across the room.
In 1989, though, the awards were broadcast live. The most noteworthy moment came in the bar afterwards when John Hurt, apparently quite the worse for wear, screamed "Fuck off or I'll kill you" at a pack of 30 photographers, who he then attempted to fight. It resulted in some spectacular photographs. Hurt himself was unrepentant, telling the Daily Express the following morning: "I'm a bad, bad boy, and I love it."
Being called out for lack of diversity is par for the course for awards shows, but the Baftas seem to get called out more than most. In 2017 (the year of Moonlight and Fences), only white people were nominated in the best actor, best actress and best director categories, causing the hashtag #BaftaSoWhite to trend on Twitter (as it was then called). It trended again in 2020, which led Bafta to undertake a formal review of its processes, widening membership to more people from underrepresented backgrounds, implementing unconscious bias training for members and scores of other measures. But guess what? It trended again in 2023.
The guest of honour at the 1996 awards was a pig. Ostensibly the reason for this is that Babe was released that year, which led many to believe that the piglet in attendance was Babe himself. However, that couldn't be. Not only did the film use 48 different pigs during production, but they would all have grown to an unmanageably enormous size by the time of the ceremony. In other words, someone took a random pig to the Baftas and got away with it.
Joanna Lumley is a national treasure, but not necessarily a natural comedian. This was the case in 2019, when she hosted the awards and found herself having to perform the opening monologue, composed entirely of the scientific opposite of jokes. To Steve Coogan, who starred in Stan and Ollie: "That's another fine dress you've got me into." To Spike Lee, who made Blackkklansman: "I'm surprised it did so well at the Klan Film Festival." The whole thing was delivered to such awkward silence, and Lumley received so many looks of genuinely sad pity from the nominees, that when Bafta came to upload it to its YouTube channel, most of her routine was absent.
1975 was a hell of a year for Jack Nicholson, who somehow managed to win the best leading actor Bafta for Chinatown and The Last Detail at the same time. Even more incredibly, he couldn't make it to the ceremony because he was busy filming another classic: One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. However, as an apology he sent in the greatest acceptance video of all time. Dressed in character as Randle McMurphy and surrounded by his castmates, Nicholson smashes a window, acts increasingly perturbed and then gets hauled off by Nurse Ratched.
Inviting Hollywood's great and good to wear skimpy outfits in London in winter - when it is always freezing and often raining - has always been one of Bafta's sickest jokes. However, in 2002, the rain ended up reacting with the flame-retardant chemicals that had been sprayed over the red carpet, which resulted in the most famous people on earth having to walk through a chilly approximation of a provincial nightclub foam party. It has been said that the snafu ruined Dame Judi Dench's shoes. For shame.
Winners of an award typically use their speeches to reflect on their illustrious careers. Not so director Louis Malle who, upon winning in 1975 for best film, used the entirety of his 26-second speech to state that, although "about 265 people" had warned him that the food served at the Baftas would be "the worst meal of my life", he had actually enjoyed what turned out to be "a very good meal".
In 2019, the Baftas commissioned Cirque du Soleil to open the show with a breathtaking interpretive dance themed around the moon landing. This was presumably because Damien Chazelle's First Man was an early awards frontrunner. However, the film was shut out of most major categories, which meant that the show found itself lumbered with an expensive setpiece based on a film that was never going to win anything substantial. It was a mistake the Baftas would not make again - that is, unless Sunday's ceremony opens with an expensive tribute to Gabby's Dollhouse: The Movie.
Look, I only agreed to write this list so I could put this at No 1. Ariana DeBose's spectacular, befuddling 2023 musical number remains my favourite moment of anything ever. To recap: at the start of the show, DeBose performed a song celebrating women in general. However, this segued into a custom rap where DeBose mentioned every female nominee by name. "Charlotte Wells we love Aftersun," she began, to looks of bemusement from the crowd. But she pressed on. "Georgia, Helene, Blue Jean's the one," she continued, offering a snazzy shout out to the team behind a searing drama about Section 28. Shortly afterwards DeBose rhymed Electric Malady (a heartbreaking documentary about a man whose life has been ruined by electrosensitivity) with the phrase "What a slay." And then, by this point visibly breathless and exhausted, she yelped the deathless phrase "Angela Bassett did the thing!" while convincingly mimicking a mosquito attack. The best thing ever to be televised, quite frankly.
