The BAFTAs Rising Star Award Has a Public Option

“It’s nice that the audience are getting to have a say in Britain’s biggest award-giving ceremony,” James McAvoy said at the 2006 British Academy Film Awards, known as the BAFTAs.

The Scottish actor, then 26, had just been named the inaugural winner of BAFTA’s Orange Rising Star Award. Introducing the newly minted prize, the British actor Patrick Stewart explained that it was presented to “a young actor or actress of any nationality who has demonstrated exceptional talent and ambition” and that it was the only accolade of the evening voted on by the British public.

Sunday’s ceremony marks the 20th anniversary of the prize, now known as the EE Rising Star Award, which the British public has bestowed on an entire generation of up-and-coming actors and actresses, including Tom Hardy, Eva Green, Letitia Wright, Daniel Kaluuya and Kristen Stewart.

This year’s nominees include Marisa Abela, the star of the Amy Winehouse biopic “Back to Black,” David Jonsson, who plays a sympathetic android in “Alien: Romulus,” and Mikey Madison, the star of Sean Baker’s “Anora,” who is also in the running for a leading actress award. (Many Rising Star Award contenders have been nominated in a BAFTA performance category as well, but none has managed the feat of winning both, so far.)

“I think that the Rising Star Award has been very smart,” Xan Brooks, a film critic for The Guardian, said in a phone interview. Especially in today’s influencer-social media culture of effervescent fame, Brooks contended that “there is a place for a Rising Star Award in the British awards firmament.”