Best Picture: Genies/Canadian Screen Awards

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iconogassed
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Best Picture: Genies/Canadian Screen Awards

Post by iconogassed »

https://www.criticker.com/films/?filter=e44451

"The Canadian Oscars", like much of Canada, are a funny thing. Understandably, they seem to prize international notice above all else, with little of the pale gentility of their US equivalent. The result is a Best Picture category that has duly recognized the greatness of both David Cronenberg's NC-17 Crash and Trailer Park Boys: The Movie.

There were once separate awards for "Best Feature" and "Film of the Year" of any length, which amusingly resulted in many years with no "Film of the Year" because the "Best Feature", ostensibly, wasn't good enough.

iconogassed
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Re: Best Picture: Genies/Canadian Screen Awards

Post by iconogassed »

I've now seen 35 (only about 60 are currently available to the public). Average tier of 6.37 and I've outright disliked only two or three which, even handicapping for the multiple wins by Brault, Egoyan, Cronenberg, and Villeneuve (and any latent patriot love) is pretty remarkable.

undinum wrote:they seem to prize international notice above all else, with little of the pale gentility of their US equivalent.

One of the best examples of this I've since seen is Les ordres, which won in 1975 after Brault won Best Director at Cannes (shared with Costa-Gavras for Special Section), the first and only time to date a Canadian filmmaker has. Its subject is the October Crisis of 1970, which, aside from the monstrous abuses of the residential school system, is probably the most egregious breach of civil rights in modern Canadian history. For a rough comparison, try to imagine an enraged fourth wall-breaking docudrama about the Waco massacre winning the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1999.

But success down there nevertheless guarantees success up here. Of the seven Canadian films nominated for the foreign-language Oscar, six won the Canadian Screen Award for Best Film. The exception in 2005 proved the rule: Deepa Mehta's Water was probably the "smart" Oscar submission that year, but C.R.A.Z.Y. went on to far more international success, and Jean-Marc Vallée is now an Oscar regular. Of course, only a portion of Canadian films are eligible for the foreign-language Oscar, which is where the stats are really revealing: every English Canadian film since the 70s nominated for a "big" Oscar has won the Canadian equivalent of Best Picture: Room (Oscar noms: picture, director, actress, screenplay, etc.), Away from Her (actress; screenplay), The Sweet Hereafter (director; screenplay), Lies My Father Told Me (screenplay), The Apprenticeship of Dudley Kravitz (screenplay), and The Triplets of Belleville (animated feature). But this is really not so significant; in the years before the internet, and considering the relative paucity of internationally successful Canadian movies in any year, it would be, and was, even easier to predict which Canadian films had a chance at an Oscar.

There is another unfortunate parallel in how readily the Canuckian voting bloc is prepared to award patriotic hagiography, regardless of merit. The difference is that for whatever their faults, the Oscars have, thanks mostly to the sheer yearly volume of the U.S. film industry, a bare minimum for technical competence that would exclude sub-TV movie trash like John A.: Birth of a Country, which won the then-Genie for Best Director in 2011.

Given the especial poverty of Canadian cinema (and literature—George Woodcock's efforts notwithstanding) around the time of the awards' inception, most of the early winners were shorts, some that were highly influential on other filmmakers, like Universe and its direct impact on Kubrick and 2001, or City of Gold being a seminal film for Ken Burns and many other documentarians. And at the risk of sounding like a goddamn brochure, winner Christopher Chapman gave American teevee a whole lot of ideas.

Somewhat surprisingly, The Forbidden Room was the first Guy Maddin film nominated, though he and they have been nominated plenty in other categories. Totally unsurprisingly, John Paizs and his wonderful films have never been nominated for anything. : (

Historically, there has been an admirable tradition of awarding genre films with little else to recommend beyond mastery—not necessarily transcendence—of their genre: Changeling (haunted house), The Silent Partner (heist thriller), Bon Cop Bad Cop (buddy cop). Though Bon Cop appears to have been something of a final straw—every winner since has had obvious socio-political concerns and/or huge international appeal (Dolan).

The state of film preservation in Canada, or of film culture in general, is some shameful shit, though the National Film Board has made many shorts and some features available for free in HD on YouTube. We had an equivalent of the U.S.'s National Film Registry for a few years, but it was gutted by the Conservative Party a decade ago and I would be shocked if the Liberals (or any future government) did anything about it.
Last edited by iconogassed on Tue Jan 02, 2018 10:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

snallygaster
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Re: Best Picture: Genies/Canadian Screen Awards

Post by snallygaster »

Thanks for the collection & commentary; I think I'll be going through some of these.

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