Only one
British female artist has been nominated out of 25 available slots in mixed-gender categories. It’s indicative of a wider industry problemBrit award nominations 2020: Dave and Lewis Capaldi top pile, with women shut outYou could say this year’s Brit nominations are as predictable as ever. It didn’t take astonishing powers of clairvoyance to predict that Lewis Capaldi would sweep the board – he was a nailed-on certainty from the moment Someone You Loved and its accompanying album Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent became not just the biggest sellers of 2019 in
Britain, but also broke America, something that has proved remarkably tricky for
UK artists to do in recent years – nor that Stormzy would do well, given his triumphant year.
But they’re also predictable in the sense of getting things slightly wrong, something the Brits has proved itself thoroughly adept at throughout its 43-year lifespan. It spent the 80s dutifully doling out gongs to a certain kind of artist – Phil Collins, Dire Straits, Sting – as if the decade’s most important musical developments, hip-hop and acid house, hadn’t actually happened. Top of the Pops, hardly a show at the bleeding edge of the musical leftfield, invariably looked more switched-on.