London was gray. It was cold. The Royal Festival Hall felt less like a temple of cinema and more like a high-end Apple Store with better catering. By the time the 2026 BAFTAs kicked off, the industry’s annual exercise in self-congratulation felt heavier than usual. We’re four years into the streaming wars' endgame, and the exhaustion is visible through the 12K cameras.

Alan Cumming saved the first hour from being a total slog. He didn’t just walk onto the stage; he materialized like a Scottish Mephistopheles in a velvet suit that probably cost more than my first apartment. He’s the only man alive who can mock a room full of ego-driven billionaires while making them feel like they’re in on the joke. His wit wasn’t just sharp. It was surgical.

"Welcome to the BAFTAs," he smiled, his eyes glinting with a malice that felt entirely earned. "Or as the algorithms call it: Content Verification Night."

The crowd laughed, but it was that tight, nervous laughter you hear in a boardroom right before layoffs. Cumming spent ten minutes skewering the new "AI-Assisted Narrative" category. It’s the one the Academy added this year to appease the tech firms pouring billions into the South Bank. He called it a "glorified spell-check for directors who don’t know how to talk to actors." The tension was thick enough to trip over. On one side, you had the old guard clutching their gin and tonics. On the other, the Silicon Valley execs in bespoke sneakers, looking like they were calculating the ROI on every punchline.

The friction is the point now. You can’t have a high-society gala in 2026 without acknowledging that half the films nominated were greenlit by a data set in Palo Alto. The trade-off is glaring. We get high-gloss, high-frame-rate spectacles, but we lose the sweat. The tickets for the balcony seats reportedly went for £5,000 on the secondary market. For that price, you’d expect the movies to have a soul. Instead, we got a "Best Film" winner that felt like it was polished to death by a committee of three hundred people who all hate each other.

Then Jessie Buckley happened.

Buckley won Best Actress for The Last Echo, a film that actually required people to go to a physical theater. When she walked up, the room shifted. The glossy, over-produced sheen of the broadcast cracked. She didn't have a prepared list of agents to thank. She didn't mention her publicist once. She looked at the gold mask in her hand, sighed, and told the truth.

"It’s all a bit of a mess, isn't it?" she asked.

The silence was the longest of the night. No music cues. No polite clapping. Just Buckley, standing there in a dress that looked like it had been through a hedge backwards, reminding everyone that acting is supposed to be visceral. It’s supposed to be messy. Her speech was a five-minute masterclass in human friction. She talked about the three months she spent in a rain-soaked tent in Wales, far away from the motion-capture suits and the LED "Volume" stages that have turned modern filmmaking into a sterile lab experiment.

She used a word that the teleprompter probably hated: "Ugly." She said art needs to be ugly to be real. The producers in the front row looked like they wanted to swallow their tongues. They want "relatable." They want "optimized." They don't want ugly. But the audience at home—the ones paying twenty quid a month for three different subscriptions they don't use—seemed to breathe with her.

The tech side of the night was, predictably, a disaster. The "Virtual Red Carpet" experience, which cost the BAFTA committee a cool £12 million to implement, crashed twice before the first award was even handed out. Fans who paid for the VR pass were treated to a view of a pixelated floor and a glitching avatar of a presenter who sounded like a Speak & Spell with a head cold. It’s a perfect metaphor for where we are. We’ve built the most expensive delivery systems in history, and we’ve forgotten to put anything worth watching inside them.

By the time the final awards were handed out, the cynicism had settled back in. The winners were largely predictable. The speeches were mostly sanitized. Even Cumming’s final quip about the after-party being "sponsored by a carbon-offsetting firm that doesn't exist" felt like a polite middle finger to a dying era.

We walked out into the London drizzle, checking our phones to see which moments had already been turned into ten-second clips for the feed. The spectacle was over. The data was being crunched. The machines were already deciding what we’ll be forced to watch next year.

Does anyone actually remember the name of the film that won the big prize, or did we just enjoy watching the lights flicker for a while?