In 2017, it felt as though diversity was winning. Well, not necessarily winning, but at least making progress towards equality in film. Scooping best picture at both the Oscars and the Golden Globes, the success of Barry Jenkins' Moonlight seemed to signal a turning point in the film industry, an indication that Hollywood had finally learnt some valuable lessons from the #OscarsSoWhite debate of 2015. The following year, Get Out received a few nods of approval, but fewer major wins. That's OK, we thought, real, meaningful change takes time and, besides, we've got Black Panther! The upward trajectory continued in 2019, giving us Green Book, BlackKklansman and If Beale Street Could Talk, which between them won many of the top prizes at the Golden Globes, Baftas and Oscars. But now it's 2020 and not a single non-white face is seen in this year's Bafta nominations. Hollywood, what happened?

Ill disguised efforts to appease audiences with faux wokeness, that's what. This year's Bafta nominations, along with a noticeable lack of people of colour acknowledged by the Golden Globes, only work to reveal the industry's true attitude towards diversity: it's regarded simply as a trend, something to cash in on when #BlackLivesMatter is trending and cast aside when extreme right-wing politics takes over even Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker demoted Kelly Marie Tran's character, Rose Tico, after she was set up to have a bigger storyline in The Last Jedi. Show business is fickle, yes, but to drop efforts to promote diversity in the industry so quickly and so dramatically is shameful, particularly for institutions such as Bafta, who only last year introduced new diversity requirements to ensure people from all backgrounds are represented both on and off screen at the awards. Seems like they devised a really effective system, doesn't it? So effective, they don't even need to acknowledge diversity at all.

But it's not just the fault of academy voters; the studios have a lot to answer for too. In 2019, a plethora of films hit the screens that were deserving of more recognition at awards season, including Us, Harriet, Hustlers, Dolemite Is My Name, Blue Story, Just Mercy and Parasite, to name a few, yet out of those films only Us and Hustlers were given decent marketing campaigns. Films made by white, male directors starring predominantly white, male casts were splashed across billboards, buses and editorial spreads all year, while the rest were left to quietly creep into cinemas and streaming services through the back door. Why didn't Netflix's Dolemite Is My Name, starring Eddie Murphy, get at least half of the same push as The Irishman? Why did Harriet only land on most people's radar once Cynthia Erivo received a Golden Globe nomination, despite being released last autumn? And why, oh why, did the wider public only become aware of Blue Story once it accidentally found itself at the centre of a racism and youth violence controversy?

The marketing teams at these film's respective studios failed them. They assumed that the audiences they felt they were made for would find them themselves and that it wasn't worth trying to convince other cinemagoers that these films were worth their time. They segregated both cinema and audiences, ignoring the outstanding success of films such as Black Panther and Moonlight, that were evidence of the fact that films with diverse talent behind are for, and can be enjoyed by, everyone. I can only wonder how this attitude towards promoting these films trickled down to awards season campaigns.

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There is also something to be said about the kind of diverse films that are typically acknowledged at awards season. Only those that are explicitly about the experience of being a person of colour are typically rewarded and, more often than not, these films are not particularly uplifting viewing. Hollywood loves to depict the suffering and trauma of POC, yet it doesn't appear to like it when cinema simply treats them as normal people. The widespread snub of Jordan Peele's Us this year makes this abundantly clear. Although the film's lead characters are a black family, their blackness is of little consequence to the plot. They're depicted just as a family of any other race would be, because guess what? We're all pretty much the same!

Lupita Nyong'o's performance in Us as both a kind family woman and her evil doppelgnger was nothing short of exceptional and the fact that Margot Robbie received double Bafta nominations for her role in Bombshell and her five minutes in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, over Nyong'o's double performance in Us, both baffles and enrages. Scarlett Johansson also receives two nominations for Marriage Story (fair enough) and Jojo Rabbit (er?), making it seem as though the voting body was just desperate to nominate anyone but an actress of colour. The biggest nod given to any diverse film went to The Personal History Of David Copperfield, but when nominated for best casting while other categories remain very, very white, it's a move that reads more like a panicked "Dev Patel's in a period film and we have to at least pretend we like diversity" than a genuine acknowledgement of achievement.

There will no doubt be those who will cry, "Why does it always have to be about race?" and "Awards season should be based on merit, not diversity quotas!" But if this batch of award season nominations prove anything, it's that it is always about race not because of the #BaftasSoWhite backlash, but because Hollywood refuses to properly acknowledge its own subconscious racial bias. People are often quick to berate positive discrimination, while neglecting to acknowledge that white people have essentially been negatively discriminating in their favour for, well, ever. It's clear that Hollywood won't wake up to diverse films unless they're aggressively reminded to, because if awards season were truly based on merit, the nominations this year would look dramatically different. If we really want diversity to win, we need to let academy voters know. Otherwise, they'll keep handing out prizes to the only people they want to win: themselves.

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The Bafta 2020 nominations prove the industry treats diversity as a fad - British GQ