Next week is the 60th anniversary of the Baftas. But who will win the coveted awards in the future? The Sunday Times Magazine assembled a cast of British talent with the ability to go all the way.

by George Perry, The Sunday Times Magazine, February 4, 2007

Awards season is upon us. Next Sunday the frocks will go on and the stars and hopefuls will parade at the Royal Opera House. Officially titled the Orange British Academy Film Awards, the ceremony is much better known as the acronym for the British Academy of Film and Television Arts -- the Baftas. Then, on February 25, the Academy Awards, the Oscars, take place in Hollywood. They used to be in March, but the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences brought them forward to make the awards season shorter.

Until a few years ago, the Baftas were totally outclassed by the Oscars. The British ceremony was held a few weeks after them, and because UK releases often occur ages after the film is out in America, they sometimes seemed to be awarding Oscar-winners of the year before. At last the idea occurred to hold the Baftas before the Oscars, and to extend the release window by two months beyond the calendar year, so that some titles will not yet have been seen by the general public. So successful has this approach been that the Baftas are now arguably the leading precursor to the Oscars, and the film world's glitterati make it a highlight in their diaries.

These are just the top ceremonies. There are now so many awards around the world at this time of the year that the trade papers no longer list them all. It's big business for Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and Screen International. From October, their pages erupt with "for-your-consideration" advertisements placed by film companies, anxious to remind those who can vote that they have eligible product, be it titles or people. To make matters worse, Christopher Guest's current film spoofing Hollywood is actually called For Your Consideration.

Once, I was in the middle of an interview in Beverly Hills with the director Billy Wilder, so often right about so many things, when a telephone call interrupted us. He spoke for a few moments in German, then hung up and said: "That was the Berlin film festival. They want to give me a lifetime-achievement award." Pause. "Two things you can count on at my time of life: awards and haemorrhoids. And they're both a pain in the butt."

To him, at the end of a glorious career, that is a reasonable opinion. However, that is not the case for those nearer the beginning. Awards are manna to agents because they boost their clients' worth, enabling them to negotiate larger salaries. Sometimes this can be self-defeating. There are plenty of cases of Oscar-winners not getting subsequent jobs because their price has zoomed too high. Or, overly flattered, they make disastrous career choices. But awards serve more purposes than accolades from peers. They push the winners into the mind's eye, and actors particularly benefit from public awareness.

How are the awards decided? Over the years, there has been much tinkering to find a perfect voting system, and the consensus is that there is really no such thing. All 6,000 Bafta members, most of them highly active in all aspects of film and television, theoretically have the right to vote, although not all exercise the privilege. It's done in three rounds, with the first to determine from a huge list of released feature films which of them should go on the shortlist. It's not just titles but people, and not just actors and directors but most of the allied craftspeople, from writers to sound editors, make-up artists and special-effects supervisors. Anyone can tell if an acting performance is brilliant or duff, but you need special awareness to appreciate the subtleties of some of the crafts, so the votes of individual Bafta chapters are counted separately. The second round of voting produces a short shortlist, and the final round considers a mere three-to-five names. One category, the Carl Foreman award, which goes to the most promising feature debut of a director, producer or writer (the three fields in which Carl Foreman excelled) is decided entirely by jury, and not by other Bafta members. After being a Foreman juror for several years, I can attest to the hard work put in watching junkloads of terrible films to find the pearl that shines out as indicating exceptional talent.

One of the big problems is that there is a huge number of films to see, and hard-working Bafta members have no time to go to everything. This Thursday, the Critics' Circle will have its annual awards shindig at the Dorchester, and although its members are a mere handful compared with Bafta's thousands, at least they will have seen all the films because it is their job to do so.

Film companies now spend vast sums to give Academy voters the opportunity to catch up. Every Soho screening room is booked round the clock with special shows for members. DVDs, or "screeners", are dispatched to them, to be viewed on the domestic plasma TV. Special DVD players have been sent out that can decode individually encrypted discs that do not work on ordinary machines. Each disc has a watermark, and if it is lent to somebody with links to DVD piracy it can be traced, and the culprit drummed out in disgrace. This year, some of the discs even had Mission: Impossible self-destruct mechanisms, rendering them unplayable after a certain date.

Screeners are crucial to voting. All the nominated films have had screeners. On the other hand, no screeners were sent out for Sacha Baron Cohen's Borat, a success at the Golden Globes. So Borat has no Bafta nominations. Be sure the film business has taken note for next time.

Winning Baftas requires a certain amount of campaigning, as well as the backing of the film company. Some screenings come with Q&A sessions, so names and faces become known. It helps to have a film that people like -- not always the same as a good film. Attendance at these things always goes down well, and sometimes has made a crucial difference. The problem for many young hopefuls is that the decision on whom to push forward for awards has often, but not always, been taken by studio executives and PRs, long before the membership has a look-in.

There is always controversy over the winners. Have the right decisions been made? Usually the answer is no, because the system isn't sophisticated enough to achieve that, however much it is fine-tuned. So the arguments are predictable, and somehow part of the hoopla.

Just for the fun of it, and to show that, whatever may be said, British films are rich in talent, we invited some excellent actors, directors and writers to be photographed, all of whom should be winning Baftas in the future. The location was a vast Regency mansion minutes from Oxford Circus' a place so plangent with eeriness that one half-expected to find the cobwebbed skeleton of Miss Havisham on an upper floor. Instead, there was a crew making a porn movie. Justin Chadwick observed: "I would love to have used this place when I was making Bleak House."

Rebecca Hall

The 24-year-old daughter of the theatre and film director Sir Peter Hall and his third wife, the opera singer Maria Ewing, dropped out of Cambridge after only two years. Having acted in many university productions, she decided to turn professional. She quickly went into her father's production of Mrs Warren's Profession in the West End. Some mutterings of nepotism were inevitable. "It was best to get it out of the way, because it was going to happen," she says. "I could have changed my name, and they would then have said, "What's she trying to hide?' It's no-win." She was in Starter for 10, the television production of Wide Sargasso Sea, and recently attracted critical approval for her acting in Christopher Nolan's The Prestige, playing a Victorian magician's wife. In the works is an as-yet-untitled Stephen Poliakoff production with Michael Gambon.

Samuel Barnett

Born in London, but raised in Whitby, North Yorkshire, the 26-year-old was set on being an actor from childhood. He went from school to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, and then to the National Theatre. He was cast as the sensitive pupil of The History Boys -- the one who came closest to Alan Bennett's alter ego. He is half-Jewish, and it fell to him to deliver one of the play's most memorable lines: "I'm a Jew. I'm small. I'm homosexual. And I live in Sheffield. I'm f***ed." Although he's played the role for so long -- on stage in several countries as well as in the film -- he still has not read Bennett's account, in Untold Stories, of how he discovered his homosexuality at school. Nor has he seen the current West End production. "I wouldn't want to see anyone else play my part. I'd get irritated at the way they handle it. But I could not have wished for a better career launch pad."

Sophia Myles

The clergyman's daughter, 26, was spotted by the screenwriter Julian Fellowes at 16 and played Lady Jane Grey in his BBC mini-series The Prince and the Pauper. She gave up a place at Cambridge to pursue an acting career. She appeared in several films, including Mansfield Park and From Hell, and television productions, but caught public attention as Lady Penelope in Thunderbirds. She was then Isolde in Tristan & Isolde, and has just made Outlander, a Viking story filmed in Nova Scotia, with John Hurt and James Caviezel. "I spent a lot of time hanging from cliffs in freezing rain," she says. She also plays a lead role in the film Hallam Foe, with Jamie Bell. Many of her film and television roles have required her to be corseted: "I was so used to the corsets that when I was playing a modern role, I felt as though I was doing it in my pyjamas."

Rafi Gavron

Rafi was Juliette Binoche's delinquent son in Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering, playing an immigrant youth who burgles the high-tech office of an architect. Because he uses free-running techniques, leaping and tumbling from building to building, the role called for considerable athleticism. "Not a problem," says Rafi, 17. "I've been doing all that since I was five." It was his first professional job, but his acting CV includes Macbeth at King Alfred School in north London, where he thinks he was a bad pupil. "Conventional teaching methods don't work on me." However, he has started his career well, and is now in the fantasy film Inkheart with Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent. With school days behind him, he is revelling in the strange new world of film. "I got a call asking me to fly to New Zealand for the day for an audition, but I'm not supposed to talk about it."

Jodie Whittaker

Managing to go 15 rounds with Peter O'Toole in Venus without faltering was some achievement for the 24-year-old film neophyte. "Ooh, but he was wonderful -- so kind and really patient," she says of O'Toole, who has been nominated for an Oscar for best actor. "It was such a comfortable environment, like a family." Whittaker comes from a village near Huddersfield. After school, she travelled round the world, then worked in a pub, and as an old-people's carer in a residential home (it shows a bit in Venus, with Leslie Phillips and Richard Griffiths as the other old-timers in her orbit). She won a place at Guildhall, though the director Roger Michell cast her in Venus without even looking at her CV. "I'm really jammy," she says of her upward trajectory. She has just appeared in Neil LaBute's Bash at the Trafalgar Studios in London, and is to be in the film Good, with Viggo Mortensen, about the rise of national socialism in Germany.

Toby Jones

A tiny part in Orlando was a modest beginning for Toby Jones, 39, who has now been in cinema for 15 years. He's the son of the character actor Freddie Jones, whose face is familiar to anyone who has ever watched TV. Toby has appeared in many films, and in theatre he won an Olivier award as the third character in the Morecambe and Wise tribute, The Play What I Wrote. He's small (5ft 5in), bubbly and genial, and he has just played a part to perfection, the needle-sharp, epicene American writer Truman Capote, in Infamous. By horrible coincidence, in a different film Philip Seymour Hoffman won an Oscar for the same part last year, but Jones is so good he blows that excellent American actor out of the water. He spent days watching endless ancient chat-show footage of Capote in action, until he had exactly caught the writer's fluting, highfalutin lilt. "Those shows were so much better then," says Jones. "They let people really talk." Now, he's playing Waddington in John Curran's version of Somerset Maugham's The Painted Veil, alongside Edward Norton and Naomi Watts.

Michael Sheen

Audiences on both sides of the Atlantic have relished the Welsh-born actor's Bafta-nominated performance as Tony Blair in The Queen, although not necessarily for the same reasons. "They still take Blair seriously in America," the 38-year-old says. Sheen studied his subject closely and plays him straight, without a hint of satire, yet he releases a great deal of humour from the portrayal. "A lot of that was due to Stephen Frears [the director]," Sheen says, modestly, before adding: "The Blair story is not over yet." He and the writer Peter Morgan hope in the future to look at the moment when Blair decided to slip into bed with Bush. Meanwhile, Sheen is in the film Blood Diamond, and has just concluded a triumphant sell-out run as David Frost in Morgan's Frost/Nixon in the West End. He is now off to play the part on Broadway, which will be followed by the film version, to be directed by Ron Howard.

Helen McCrory

The 38-year-old had to drop out of the last Harry Potter film because she was about to give birth to her daughter, fathered by her fiancé, the actor Damian Lewis. Since then, she's made a big impact on film audiences with her portrayal of Cherie Blair in The Queen. Born in London, she was educated at Queenswood girls' school in Hertfordshire. She's an impressive stage actress who made her debut at the National in Lorca's Blood Wedding, for which she immediately won a best-actress award from the Manchester Evening News. Since then she has gathered a raftload. Films and television take second place, but she was recently memorable opposite Heath Ledger as Casanova's mother. If anybody has it in them to eventually step into the shoes of Dame Judi, it's most likely to be McCrory, although she will do it her way.

Dominic Cooper

A graduate of Lamda, from Greenwich, London, the 28-year-old achieved his fame as the libido-laden, most self-assured of The History Boys, both on stage and in the film version. He has accrued a huge pile of deserved accolades. But then, Alan Bennett's play has dominated his life for the past three years. He played the part in London, on Broadway and in Hong Kong and Australasia. He is now excited to be moving on, although he recognises that he could not have had a better start. "The History Boys was wonderful to do, a tremendous, door-opening break." Did the smart-arse part he played night after night enter his personal psyche? He certainly has a confident bearing, but you would expect that from a handsome, promising, young actor. His post-Bennett era is now here. He played a non-contestant in Starter for 10, and will be seen later this year in John Krasinski's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.

Alice Eve

Alice Eve, 24, is the daughter of the actor Trevor Eve and the actress Sharon Maughan (remember all those Nescafé Gold Blend commercials with Anthony Head?). Alice is blonde, statuesque, beautiful, but certainly not vacuous. She spent much of her childhood in America while her parents pursued their careers, and was at school there before returning to England. She is able to affect an unforced American accent with ease, enhancing her marketability. Educated at Bedales, then Westminster, she spent her gap year back in the United States, where she studied for nine months at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, and was imbued with method acting and the necessity to find her "inner truth". She got that out of her system when she went on to St Catherine's College, Oxford, where she read English. Naturally, she was heavily involved in university drama, especially with the Oxford University Dramatic Society. "I was playing parts I'm never likely to have professionally, ever," she says. Her film debut was in Richard Eyre's Stage Beauty, and she was in Starter for 10, a 1980s period piece centred on the University Challenge quiz game, and Big Nothing, a crime caper set in Oregon but filmed, amazingly, on the Isle of Man. She's about to embark on Starter for 10's American promo trip, and is planning to make a stage debut on Broadway this year in Tom Stoppard's Rock'n'Roll.