The Baftas need more than David Tennant's awful jokes to get ...

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How do you get people to care about the Baftas? This Sunday night, Britain’s foremost film ceremony faced the same uphill battle that every awards show faces this year: distracting controversies, audience fatigue, and, with some noteworthy exceptions, a rather middling lineup of films. Bafta’s solution, it seems, is to go with the tried and true, tapping David Tennant for the second year running to host its star-studded ceremony.

Don’t get me wrong: audiences seem to love David Tennant. The Scottish actor kicked off BBC One’s Baftas telecast with a skit set backstage, in which he received passive-aggressive advice from a number of famous faces, including Helen Mirren and Brian Cox, who materialised in his dressing room mirror. Cox’s Logan Roy-tinged pep talk segues into a kilt-clad rendition of The Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)”, which Tennant belts out while walking into the Royal Festival Hall auditorium, enlisting many of the seated stars in attendance as backing singers – James McAvoy, Harriet Walter, Selena Gomez among them. In the wrong hands, this kind of kitsch and cringey opening would seem downright excruciating. Tennant, earnest and boyish, just about sells it.

What follows was less convincing: a series of trite one-liners about the major nominees, which mostly just serves as a reminder as to why the major US awards shows usually have practised late-night comedians handle this sort of thing. Remarking on the Bafta-nominated Dune: Part Two, Tennant quips that he “naively thought” a sequel to Dune would be called “July”. Discussing Timothée Chalamet’s range of roles over the past two years, from Willy Wonka in Wonka to Paul Atreides in Dune: Part Two, to Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, Tennant jokes that “The Tims, they are a’changing”. A gag punning on Vladimir Putin and the dating app Tinder (“Putin-der”) was met with a robust laugh on the telecast but, according to colleagues who were in attendance, the line actually prompted widespread groans.

I suppose it’s better to keep things light, given the somewhat fraught discourse surrounding this year’s awards season. Mostly, this has to do with Emilia Perez, the Spanish-language musical about a transgender crime boss that was, for a period, tipped to become a major contender this year beforea controversy surrounding its female lead Karla Sofía Gascón, and her history of offensive tweets, seemingly derailed it. Unsurprisingly, there was no mention of the scandal in Tennant’s patter; the film did win two Baftas, for Best Film Not in the English Language and Best Supporting Actress, out of a total 11 nominations.

That the night’s biggest winners were The Brutalist and Conclave – the former an ambitious but daunting epic about a Hungarian architect, the latter a just-alright middlebrow thriller set in the corridors of papal power – attests to just how hard of a sell this year’s slate has been. This time around, there is no Oppenheimer, last year’s awards juggernaut that was also a box office smash hit. The concessions to popular cinema this year, namely Dune: Part Two and the musical adaptation Wicked, were, as predicted, shut out of the major categories, though they did enjoy some success in the technical fields.

The ceremony quickened and slowed as the presenters came and went. Stephen Merchant was the surprise highlight of the evening, funny and confident as he presented the award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Elsewhere, the ceremony was more watchable when it played things straight: Warwick Davis’s heartfelt tribute to his late wife, when receiving the Bafta Fellowship, for example, or David Jonsson’s endearing acceptance speech for the Rising Star award.

It was an underwhelming ceremony for an underwhelming awards season. It’s significant, perhaps, that the Oscars have gone bold with their choice for the forthcoming ceremony – hiring Conan O’Brien, a genuinely surprising and inventive comedian, as the host. The Baftas went safe, and safe is what they got. Tennant may well walk 500 miles to host a Baftas ceremony. I wouldn’t walk as far as my front door to go and see it.