Baftas 2021: All The Major Winners & Losers
3. Best Documentary - My Octopus Teacher
The smart money was on Romanian film The Collective to win Best Documentary, after being nominated in two categories at the Oscars: Best Documentary Feature and Best International Feature Film.
However, this simple tale of one filmmaker and his relationship with an octopus managed to win over the hearts of the Bafta voters. In many ways this perfectly encapsulates the baffling nature of awards ceremonies which ask you to compare polar opposite documentaries like My Octopus Teacher and The Collective. One examines the corruption and subsequent shocking cover up within Romanian politics while the other looks at a diver and a bloody octopus.
It is not that either of these films are better than the other, so much as they are very different films with very different purposes. Pitting two such contradictory films against each other both shows the true diversity of genres you can have within one category like documentary while also shining a light on how it is truly impossible to even compare the two features.