The BAFTA Board of Trustees announced Friday it is working to address its shortcomings in “accessibility, inclusion planning, culture and event communication and command structure” more than a month after a racial slur controversy overshadowed its annual awards celebration.
The board for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts said in a statement published Friday that an independent review of the scandal found “a number of structural weaknesses in BAFTA’s planning, escalation procedures and crisis coordination arrangements.” During the Feb. 22 awards ceremony, a white audience member with Tourette syndrome hurled a racial slur while “Sinners” stars Michael B. Jordan and Delroy Lindo, who are Black, were on stage. BAFTA and BBC faced swift backlash — and have since apologized — for failing to edit out the slur before broadcasting the ceremony after a two-hour delay.
In Friday’s statement, the board of trustees said that the external review by RISE Associates “did not find evidence of malicious intent” from the parties behind the February event and offered renewed apologies to the Black community and “the disability community.” The man who hurled the racial slur was John Davidson, a Scottish Tourette syndrome campaigner who was the executive producer and subject of the BAFTA-winning film “I Swear.”
The board acknowledged that it had fallen short on its diversity and inclusion goals, adding that it did not adequately anticipate “the impact of such an incident in a live event environment.” RISE said in a statement included in the press release that BAFTA did not escalate “early warning signs” and that the organization’s lack of a “clear operational command structure” limited its ability to effectively address the incident.
The incident and subsequent fallout are “evidence that existing structures were not sufficiently robust for a modern live broadcast environment,” RISE added.
Friday’s statement also laid out the board’s three-part plan to address its shortfalls, from improving “escalation processes” and communication to addressing “any internal cultural gaps” that might be in the way of its diversity, equity and inclusion commitments.
“We are determined to learn from what happened, and to ensure inclusion and belonging for all is meaningful in practice as well as in principle,” the statement concluded.
The fallout from the controversy included an apology from Davidson, reports about how the BBC managed to censor a second slur and a call to “Free Palestine” ahead of its telecast, and additional reports of a tense meeting between “Sinners” studio Warner Bros. and the BBC over the incident.
For “Sinners” stars Jordan and Lindo, the 57th NAACP Image Awards less than a week after the BAFTAs offered community, big awards-circuit gains for “Sinners” and a break from the uproar.
“We appreciate all the support we’ve been shown in the aftermath of what happened last weekend,” Lindo told Image Awards attendees. “It is an honor to be here among our people this evening. … It’s a classic case of something that could have been very negative becoming very positive.”
Jordan, who won entertainer of the year that evening, went on to secure the sought-after lead actor prize at the 98th Academy Awards in March. As he accepted the Oscar, his first, Jordan attributed his win to the “people who came before me” and listed celebrated Black actors — “giants,” “greats” — including Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington and Halle Berry.
“Thank you everybody in this room and everybody at home for supporting me over my career. I feel it,” he said. “I know you want me to do well and I wanna do that because you guys bet on it … I’m gonna keep stepping up.”
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