James Bond and the Queen gave me two of my best nights in the cinema in 2006, and two of my most enjoyable professional encounters. Martin Campbell, director of Casino Royale, is a gentleman, a craftsman and a veteran who knows his strengths and is prepared to put the hours and the effort in. Peter Morgan, writer of the Queen (and just about everything else worthwhile of the last 12 months) is a fearsomely intelligent, very diligent, intensely private man whose head I fear may soon explode from the pressure of unwanted attention (writers are so starry now that we may have to abolish that old joke about the dumb acress who slept with the guy who wrote the script, but that's a subject for another post). What I'm getting to in a roundabout way is that no matter how much I loved both films, I think it would be a mistake if they swept the board at the BAFTA Awards. Think about it. How retrograde a step would it be if the representatives of the 21st century British film industry were the royal family and James Bond? We might as well start filming National Trust Tea Towels or condemn ourselves to endless remakes of Calendar Girls. If BAFTA wants to be seen as a serious player on the international Awards scene, it has to be better than the Oscars. It has to think internationally.

Incidentally, sponsorship sometimes throws up odd problems, nicht wahr? The very lovely Eva Green is nominated in the BAFTA's Orange Rising Star Category. Surely there are oranger rising stars, like Gavin Henson or Bianca Gascoigne. And wasn't STephen Milligan the Orange Rising star of the Conservative Party before his tragic, sorry, hilarious accident?