When the AFI announced last year it was revamping its annual awards by creating a new sister organisation, The Australian Academy Of Cinema And Television Arts, it wasn't easy to get a grip on exactly what it all meant.
The potential for confusion was real, not helped by the name of the new awards, the AACTAs, sounding just like “The Actors”. The justification for the shift was that the new awards would more closely involve the participation of the local screen industry and bring Australia into line with Britain's BAFTA. Which all sounded highly positive and exciting. The questions started to pile up when you examined the media releases more closely and discovered no real explanation of exactly how the new awards would differ from the old ones.
When I put this to AFI chief executive Damian Trewhella, he replies by saying that in view “this is probably one of the biggest shifts the organisation has had to date. One of the issues with the AFI is that not many people confidently had much of a sense of what the AFI was really doing. One of the reasons is that it was somewhat unique in what it was doing; it was doing particular things in its own kind of way. Now I'm not saying things were necessarily wrong or bad, but it was hard to understand.”
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The changes, he says, involve “the alignment with what I call world's best practice, the movement to a model that is very well recognised and understood the world over now for decades. That has already triggered in so many people I've spoken to, nationally and internationally, an awakening, where they've said, 'Oh god, so that's what you're doing?'
Read the rest of Lynden's blog at SBS Film.
