Jessie Buckley suggests film industry gives too much weight to Oscar campaigns — SkimNews
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- Jessie Buckley questioned whether the film industry gives Oscar campaigns too much weight at the expense of nurturing emerging talent, speaking at the BFI and Chanel film-makers awards in London.
- Buckley was responding to comments by John Malkovich, who said Oscar campaigns were now the only way to get audiences into cinemas, and pointed to shoestring-budget films like Obsession and Backrooms as evidence that quality — not IP or marketing — fills seats.
- Four emerging UK filmmakers were named recipients of this year's BFI and Chanel film-makers awards, each receiving £20,000, including Rich Felgate for We, the Hated (a Just Stop Oil documentary), Olive Nwosu for Lagos-set Lady, Imran Perretta for racial-profiling drama Ish, and Rachel Taparjan for adopted-from-Romania documentary Something Familiar.
- Gwendoline Christie, BFI CEO Ben Roberts, Edward Enninful and Marie-Louise Khondji joined Buckley on the jury; Christie said the field's strength led them to select four winners rather than three.
- Buckley said Felgate's documentary realigned her on protest, calling it "essential to democracy" that is too often misunderstood in the current climate.
Why it matters: Buckley's critique lands at a moment when shoestring-budget UK films like Obsession and Backrooms have drawn audiences on quality alone, giving the argument empirical weight against studio marketing orthodoxy. The £80,000 in BFI and Chanel grassroots funding represents a small but concrete institutional counterweight that emerging filmmakers can point to when pitching projects outside the Oscar-campaign economy.
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