“It’s nice that the audience are getting to have a say in Britain’s biggest award-giving ceremony,” James McAvoy said at the 2006 British Academy Film Awards, known as the BAFTAs.
The Scottish actor, then 26, had just been named the inaugural winner of BAFTA’s Orange Rising Star Award. Introducing the newly minted prize, the British actor Patrick Stewart explained that it was presented to “a young actor or actress of any nationality who has demonstrated exceptional talent and ambition” and that it was the only accolade of the evening voted on by the British public.
Sunday’s ceremony marks the 20th anniversary of the prize, now known as the EE Rising Star Award, which the British public has bestowed on an entire generation of up-and-coming actors and actresses, including Tom Hardy, Eva Green, Letitia Wright, Daniel Kaluuya and Kristen Stewart.
This year’s nominees include Marisa Abela, the star of the Amy Winehouse biopic “Back to Black,” David Jonsson, who plays a sympathetic android in “Alien: Romulus,” and Mikey Madison, the star of Sean Baker’s “Anora,” who is also in the running for a leading actress award. (Many Rising Star Award contenders have been nominated in a BAFTA performance category as well, but none has managed the feat of winning both, so far.)
“I think that the Rising Star Award has been very smart,” Xan Brooks, a film critic for The Guardian, said in a phone interview. Especially in today’s influencer-social media culture of effervescent fame, Brooks contended that “there is a place for a Rising Star Award in the British awards firmament.”
“We’re carpet-bombed with rising talent, but that is a fairly sort of indiscriminate round of applause, and it’s very much tied to marketing and hype,” Brooks said, adding that the award makes emerging actors “feel that they are sitting at the top table with the Ian McKellens and Judi Denches and the grandees of British culture, as opposed to a slightly condescending thing of just like: you’re young and pretty and so here you are on TikTok.”
Brooks regarded the decision to establish the award two decades ago as “an ingenious knight’s move” that let some fresh air into an institution that was seen as “solid, classy and reliable, but also a little bit fussy and formal and lacking the glamour and razzle-dazzle of the Oscars or the Globes.” At the same time, the award was a way for the BAFTAs to stand out in an increasingly crowded awards season.
“The award needs to be robust, authentic and properly set up, and it also needs to be reflective of BAFTA values to champion the screen arts and support talent from whatever community, particularly those that are underrepresented,” said Jane Millichip, the chief executive of BAFTA. Speaking in a joint video call with Anna Higgs, the chair of BAFTA’s film committee, Millichip said that an award bestowed by popular choice complimented BAFTA’s traditional peer-to-peer voting method, in which only BAFTA members vote on the nominees and winners.
“The public is a really essential component in this relationship, because it’s important that we support developing talent, that we support independent film, that we also celebrate populist, big commercial films as well. There’s a balance to be had here, which is around embracing the full panoply of the cultural landscape,” she said.
While British film fans select the winner of the EE Rising Star Award, the nominees for the prize are not popularly chosen. In October, a panel of film industry members and journalists put forth names for a contender list (not made public), which was whittled down to five nominees by a BAFTA-appointed jury. According to Brooks, that fact that the public is shut out of this process is a crucial element of the prize, and may serve to forestall criticism about it as purely a people’s choice award.
“You’re throwing a bone to the old guard of BAFTA,” he said. “There’s a kind of quality control going on, and only then do you turn it over to the public vote,” he added.
The current jury includes last year’s winner of the prize, Mia McKenna-Bruce, who starred in 2023’s “How To Have Sex,” the director Molly Manning Walker’s feature debut about 16-year-old girls partying on a Greek island. The film, which won the Un Certain Regard Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, was a small, independent project, which made McKenna-Bruce’s win in a popularly voted category particularly impressive. (Compare that with McAvoy, whose highest-profile role before being named a Rising Star at the 2006 ceremony was Mr. Tumnus in the film adaptation of “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”)
“I think what the award really shows is that audiences will always connect with the authenticity and relatability in stories,” McKenna-Bruce wrote in an email interview, noting that was the case regardless of the size of a film’s budget.
“People want to see something real, something that resonates with them on a personal level. ‘How to Have Sex’ was a story that was raw and honest, and I think that spoke to people,” she wrote.
McKenna-Bruce, who answered questions from Senegal, where she was filming Claire Denis’s “The Cry of the Guards,” called the award a unique accolade that could put wind in the sails of an emerging actor. “It gives people the chance to be recognized for their work early on, and I think that’s such an important thing in this industry. It’s really gotten me in rooms or discussions I may not have been in previously,” she wrote.
BAFTA does not share statistics on how many votes are cast, but according to Millichip, the number has risen steadily over the past two decades. Higgs added that tens of thousands of votes were submitted from all over Britain and credited the cresting popularity of the prize with “the rise of social media and digital platforms” that increased both the award’s visibility and the ease of voting. In 2006 fans could either vote on a static web page or via text message.
The award is given in memory of Mary Selway, a renowned British casting director who died in 2004 and whose credits included “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Love Actually” and “Gosford Park.”
According to Higgs, Selway “was really renowned in the industry, particularly by producers, for not only being able to kind of corral sometimes the big stars that you need to get your film financed, but also to spot those talents of tomorrow,” Higgs said. When McAvoy won the award in 2006, he praised Selway as someone who “cared about nurturing talent, not just about finding the next hot thing for the next five minutes.”
Despite the award’s longevity and the impressive list of past recipients, Brooks expressed skepticism about the ability of the public to identify and award true acting greatness. “Most people can spot a pretty face and a charismatic presence. Some of those people can spot real talent as well,” he said. “And I only hope that it’s those some people that are voting in the public vote,” he said.
For her part, McKenna-Bruce had no qualms about putting her faith in the thousands of British film fans who cast a ballot this year.
“Ultimately, I think it’s about the connection you make with the audience, and I think voters really pick up on that,” she wrote.
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