There are those of us who consider the Baftas to be one of the longest-running jokes in the British film industry, along with the notion that there is even such a thing as a British film industry. But if they do represent a gag, it is only the most mirthless sort, as the director Mike Leigh can surely attest.

At last year’s Cannes film festival, his long-gestating passion project, Mr Turner, was rapturously received. A jury headed by Jane Campion and including Nicolas Winding Refn, Jia Zhangke and Willem Dafoe awarded the best actor prize to its star, Timothy Spall, for his performance – all bluster, phlegm and heartache – as the painter JMW Turner. The acclaim continued when the picture opened in Britain in October. What’s more, with UK takings of £6.58m, Mr Turner is among the 10 highest-grossing British films of 2014. Leigh’s move to a larger canvas has resulted in the biggest hit of a career which began more than 40 years ago. It wasn’t far-fetched to hope that its excellence would be recognised come awards season. But artistic achievement, critical accolades and popularity among the public clearly hold no sway with Bafta.

Not that the four paltry nods that the film received were undeserved. Dick Pope was rightly nominated for his luminous cinematography, while the film is also in the running also in the categories of make-up and hair, production design and costume design. (A similar pattern was repeated at the Oscar nominations, announced on Thursday, where the movie was recognised only in three technical categories, including cinematography.) But the absence of Mr Turner from all other Bafta categories is not only galling; it represents an unambiguous snub. The 6,500 voting Bafta members threw their weight instead behind a pair of trumped-up TV movies: The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything. They decided, in their wisdom, that there was no room for Leigh in the best director category. And while Spall might have impressed Jane Campion, he couldn’t hold a candle, in Bafta’s estimation, to Eddie Redmayne, Benedict Cumberbatch or Jake Gyllenhaal.

Even in the consolation-prize category otherwise known as Outstanding British Film, where the big boys and girls are made to sit on the bench so the weaklings can have a shot at goal, Mr Turner was elbowed aside by Pride, Paddington and ’71. The whole affair could scarcely be more insulting unless nominees at next month’s ceremony are forced to tramp along a red carpet bearing a giant image of Mike Leigh’s face.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Guardian Film Show reviews Mr Turner

Mr Turner does not want for admirers. “Mike Leigh and Timothy Spall’s great achievement is showing us how the artist approached the physical business of painting,” Sir Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate galleries, tells me. “But they also convey the spirit of a man whose reputation as a curmudgeon is unwarranted, given his passionate interest in people and the world around him. There is a great humanitarian streak in Turner and Mike Leigh has found a way of capturing this on film, as he has done so often before.”

The actor Joe Tucker, whose screen work with Leigh includes Career Girls and All or Nothing, thinks the director has excelled himself. “It really is Mike working at the peak of his powers,” he says. “It’s an evocative, layered period film but it has the heavy scent of the Mike Leigh world. The mountain those actors will have climbed in the course of their research would have been extraordinary.”



The writer and critic Amy Raphael, who edited the book Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh, also believes Mr Turner to be among the film-maker’s finest work. “It is not, thank the lord, a chocolate-box biopic of a great British artist,” she says. “It is instead a dazzling film about a painter who was a genius and a regular bloke. Of course it’s about Turner’s singular art, but it’s also, as ever in Mike’s work, about the big themes: love, loss, life, death.” She is especially appalled about the best actor snub: “Perhaps it doesn’t matter to the award-givers that Tim Spall has given us a performance worthy of Orson Welles. After all, he’s not as good at photo-bombing as the boy Cumberbatch.”

The relationship between director and awards body has never exactly been harmonious. In 1997, shortly after winning three prizes for Secrets and Lies (which was also nominated for five Oscars), Leigh revealed that he had let his Bafta membership lapse. “This was the first time anybody has ever had a Bafta award for anything in any of my films or television pieces,” he observed. “I can say nothing more eloquent than those facts. I leave everyone to form their own opinions on that.” He was especially incensed by a disparity between the receptions to his work at home and abroad. In 1993, a precedent for the Cannes/Bafta divide had been established when the festival gave Naked a brace of trophies – best director, and best actor for David Thewlis – while Bafta overlooked the movie entirely. “When you get best director and best actor at Cannes and not even a nomination at Bafta, it was then I gave up. What that tells you about Bafta, well it doesn’t need me to spell it out.”

Bafta does not have a dazzling modern-day record in the field of independent voting. The shifting of its awards ceremony in 2001 to pre-empt the Oscars has done nothing to diminish the impression that it will always be a feeble facsimile of its US counterpart. The difference now is that, rather than mimicking the Oscar nominations, the Baftas mostly second-guess them. (On one of the rare occasions where this proved not to be the case, Leigh was the unexpected beneficiary: he was named best director in 2005 for his film Vera Drake.) If the organisation has an ongoing problem with Leigh, Raphael thinks it might be that they consider him too highfalutin.

Watch a video interview with Mike Leigh and the stars of Mr Turner, Timothy Spall and Marion Bailey

“In my mind, Mike is sometimes at one end of British film-making and Danny Boyle is at the other,” she explains. “Both are widely celebrated yet are not quite fully accepted by the establishment. Mike because he’s an auteur and thus too profound, and Danny because he’s so visceral and therefore considered too superficial. It leaves them both slightly isolated unless they make a Secrets and Lies or a Slumdog Millionaire.”

It is easy to forget that, for all its box-office success, Mr Turner is still an odd duck. With a fastidious accretion of detail rather than a conventional spick-and-span story arc, and a portrayal of its main character for which the phrase “warts and all” would be an understatement, it would be wrong to suggest that it is an orthodox or undemanding watch. But when Bafta chooses trad over rad, it is voting not for excellence but for ease. Not for cinema that endures but for unchallenging entertainment that will fit nicely into Sunday evening television schedules. Not for the future but the past.

“It’s hard to say what’s behind the Bafta decision,” says Tucker. “It could be just the way the cards have fallen. Or maybe it’s a remnant of a begrudging attitude toward Mike’s process, his method. If that’s the case it would be really curious because he’s authentic and real, yet he’s still in some quarters regarded as an outsider and a renegade despite having been making films of consistent quality for nearly 45 years.”

Of course, any sane filmgoer knows that awards don’t really matter in the long run. No one now refuses to watch Raging Bull because it didn’t win the best picture Oscar, and turns for comfort instead to Ordinary People, the almost forgotten film that pipped it. Audiences of the future, if they look back at all at movies from 2015, will hardly be making their viewing choices based on Bafta tallies. Quality will out. We have to cling to that. And the snub may not occupy Leigh’s attention for very long. “He’s a team player,” says Raphael. “He uses the same crew again and again, so he will be gracious and happy about the technical nominations the film has. But he’s busy on his next projects and is devoted to the London Film School, so I doubt he’ll be thinking about Bafta much at all. He’s won plenty of awards in Europe – in Cannes, Venice, Locarno, Berlin – and five of his films have been Oscar-nominated. He doesn’t exactly need the validation of further Baftas.”

That may be so. Bafta voters might care to look, though, at the messages they are sending to audiences, to financiers – and also to those budding film-makers who have not yet picked up their first camera. Rewarding the mediocre and the conventional, while overlooking the scrupulous and the innovative, amounts to playing the short game. With that sort of thinking, a national cinema that thrives on High Hopes can easily come to resemble nothing more than a compendium of Bleak Moments.