This week’s Radio Times is a BAFTA Film Awards special
In this issue, hear from the ceremony’s co-hosts Richard E Grant and Alison Hammond, as well as the nominees, and discover where you can watch the nominated films.
Lockdown changed so much about our everyday lives, from the way we worked, to how we relaxed, to the television we watched. But few areas of life changed more dramatically during the great confinements of 2020 and 2021 than the world of cinema.
Cinema used to refer to a place as much as a medium. But nowadays it’s increasingly used to mean a film watched mostly on screens a great deal smaller than those found at your local multiplex, whether on your phone, your tablet, your laptop or your flatscreen TV.
This trend predates the pandemic, but as the film critic James King tells us in the new issue of Radio Times magazine, COVID lockdowns mean that global box office takings for 2022 remain 35 per cent short of pre-pandemic levels.
At the same time, television’s great streaming revolution has gathered pace and one of the benefits the rise of the likes of Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+ and Disney Plus has given us, is the option of watching new films often within weeks and sometimes even days of them being released.
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That’s certainly true of many of the films in the running for a BAFTA, in a ceremony that will be broadcast live on Sunday. Gone are the days when you’d watch and wonder if the movies in the running were any good. Instead, with the right streaming subscriptions, you can watch many of them at home long before a celebrity opens an envelope to say: "And the winner is..."
For those who can afford it, this is a huge benefit of subscribing to a streaming service, and in this week's Radio Times, you will find our guide to where to watch many of this year’s BAFTA nominees. For the gloomy cinephile it might feel like the beginning of the end. But as King reminds us, the film industry successfully adapted to the advent of TV and the birth of video. No doubt in time we will discover how streaming movies straight into viewers’ homes came to be seen as cinema’s great opportunity, not a threat.
Also in this week’s Radio Times:
- Tár star Cate Blanchett on cancel culture, the double standards facing women in positions of power and unexamined rage
- Lesley Paterson, screenwriter of All Quiet on the Western Front, discusses her 16-year struggle to get the film made – while juggling being a world champion triathlete with writing – and re-mortgaging her home to fulfil her dream
- Murdered Harry Potter actor Rob Knox’s father Colin talks about his happy memories of his heroic son, the lack of government action on knife crime and his last conversation with Rob
- Kris Marshall and Sally Bretton chat about the return of their Death in Paradise characters for new spin-off series Beyond Paradise
The British Academy Film Awards 2023 air on BBC One at 7pm on Sunday 19th February.
If you're looking for more to watch, check out our TV Guide and Streaming Guide or visit our Drama hub for more news and features.
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