If you didn’t watch the Baftas last night, it means you missed one of the all-time great berserk musical performances ever seen: Angela Bassett Did the Thing.
That wasn’t its official name, by the way. Nobody knows what the official name was. Technically it was a musical performance by Ariana DeBose, but it was a performance so gormless, so busy, so deeply and unsettlingly confusing, that to give it a name would only serve to minimise it. Angela Bassett Did the Thing came as the middle part of DeBose’s medley celebrating women. The first part was a full-bore rendition of Sisters are Doin’ It For Themselves; in itself an orgy of spinning and twirling and flung chairs, performed by DuBose in the manner of someone desperately trying to spook a horse. The last part was a snatch of We Are Family, presumably because someone decided that the Baftas weren’t enough like a provincial wedding reception.
But we are not here to talk about that. We are here to talk about Angela Bassett Did the Thing; in which Academy Award-winning actress Ariana DeBose, already quite out of puff from the aforementioned horse-scaring, rapped about most of the female nominees in turn, while performing a terrifyingly high energy dance. It was excruciating, like a work dinner where the boss gets drunk and goes around the table addressing every single employee by name.
To make matters worse, the Bafta director insisted on cutting away to every woman whom DeBose namechecked as she namechecked them, which would have been a lovely touch had any of them looked even slightly pleased about it. Instead, they all just looked scared and confused. In years to come, oral histories will be written about Angela Bassett Did the Thing. Movies will be made about it. Until then, however, a line by line breakdown – with screengrabbed reaction shots – will have to suffice.