BAFTA holds the 80th EE BAFTA Film Awards on Sunday 21 February 2027 at the Royal Festival Hall, its home since 2023.
The British Academy gave its first film awards on 29 May 1949, two years after the British Film Academy was founded by David Lean, Alexander Korda, Carol Reed, Charles Laughton, Laurence Olivier, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger among others, and the ceremony has been broadcast since 1956. It is voted by an academy of working practitioners rather than by critics or by the public, which is what separates a BAFTA from every other prize in the British film year. The 2027 ceremony is the eightieth.
The Academy has spent the last decade rebuilding how the voting works, in response to a review of who was being nominated and by whom, and the changes keep coming. For 2027 the Outstanding British Film longlist expands from fifteen titles to twenty, and the Casting Chapter joins the Acting Chapter in voting on the performance categories through the first two rounds.
The awards are at the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday 21 February 2027, the ceremony’s home since it moved to the Southbank Centre in 2023. Longlists are announced on 7 January and nominations on 19 January. A concert auditorium seats the room facing one way, so this ceremony is watched rather than dined through, which is not true of its Los Angeles counterparts. The Academy merged with the television producers’ guild in 1958, which is why one body now hands out both sets of awards, and EE has sponsored the film ceremony since 2013.