Tammy Frick, CEO of the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television, attends the 2023 Canadian Screen Awards - Comedic & Dramatic Arts Awards, on April 14, 2023, in Toronto.Jeremy Chan/Getty Images
There is no polite way to describe last year’s edition of the Canadian Screen Awards.
Embarrassing and condescending, the one-hour CBC broadcast last April profoundly failed this country’s storytellers, prioritizing long-gone-Hollywood talent like Ryan Reynolds and hackneyed comedic bits about clichéd Canadiana over artists who actually work and thrive inside this country’s ecosystem.
Combine the aftertaste of that misstep with the many other crises facing Canada’s screen sector – from the limbo-like status of the Online Streaming Act to the collapse of the traditional broadcast landscape – and this year’s edition of the CSAs arrives next week during what feels like a mission-critical moment.
Yet Tammy Frick, chief executive of the Academy for Canadian Cinema & Television, which produces the CSAs, is well-aware of the weight placed upon her organization’s shoulders.
“We got some wonderful feedback from last year and, of course, some negative feedback, so that all challenges you to reassess things,” Frick says in an interview. “We’re not going to please everyone, but we’re learning, we’re innovating.”
To that end, this year’s 12th edition of the CSAs – which will hand out 171 awards over the course of four nights, culminating in a one-hour CBC broadcast May 31 – will be a slightly remixed affair.
Like last year’s telecast, this year’s show won’t be live but ”live-to-tape.”
“We’ll have our big two-hour gala awards show on the afternoon of May 31, then we’ll drop in moments that happened hours before, and earlier in the week from the other awards shows, into one 60-minute broadcast that will air that night,” Frick explains. “But the majority of the show will have a ‘live’ feel.”
Comedian Mae Martin is hosting this year and the star of Netflix’s upcoming series Tall Pines will actually be in Toronto to participate. This already sets Martin apart from last year’s host, Samantha Bee, who filmed her material in New York. Meanwhile, the ceremonies will have a decidedly more intimate feel, with the Canadian Academy moving the shows into Toronto’s CBC Broadcast Centre, which has a capacity of about 600, instead of the more cavernous Meridian Hall, which the CSAs struggled to fill in the past. And although this year’s broadcast is being produced by Makers, which handled last year’s boondoggle, Frick is confident of the show’s current direction.
“We are very much dedicated to getting as much content supporting Canadian talent out there to the public,” she says. “We tried a new format last year coming out of the pandemic, and learned a lot.”
One more tweak: The marquee telecast will air on a Friday night instead of the traditional awards-show slot of Sunday, a change that the Canadian Academy pitched the CBC to capitalize on what Frick describes as a larger weeknight audience.
Will all these changes be enough to not only draw in new audiences, but retain those hearty few CanCon devotees who historically watch the CSAs? Last year’s broadcast had an average audience of 136,000 in what ratings firm Numeris categorizes as the “2+” age market, and just 31,000 in the 25-54 demographic. That’s more than double the 25-54 audience for the pandemic-era 2022 broadcast, but not exactly numbers to crow about. (The show also streams live on CBC Gem, though the network doesn’t release streaming figures.)
Perhaps the omnipresence of director Matt Johnson’s BlackBerry – the second-most popular Canadian film at the domestic box office last year behind the Paw Patrol sequel, and easily the most talked-about homegrown movie in ages – will help draw in curious eyeballs. Like last year’s CSAs, where Clement Virgo’s drama Brother won a record 12 awards including Best Picture, the odds of a BlackBerry sweep this edition could generate desperately needed buzz. The same goes for the multiple nods scored by Brandon Cronenberg’s Infinity Pool, the Crave miniseries Little Bird, and the final season of CBC’s Workin’ Moms.
Then again, the Canadian Academy is facing its own internal challenges, some of which feel like unforced errors. In February, just two weeks before it was set to announce the nominees for this year’s CSAs, the organization announced that this year’s awards would be pushed more than a month later than originally scheduled owing to the change in venue. (Next year’s CSAs will return to the traditional early April slot.)
Not only did the late-game shift cause headaches for film and TV executives plotting potential marketing campaigns, but the move puts this year’s CSAs smack in the middle of a hectic spot on the industry calendar. When the CSAs hand out the first batch of awards Tuesday, it will be just days after the end of the Cannes Film Festival, the start of the upfront season (when broadcasters present new programming to advertisers), and in the midst of the Inside Out Film Festival in Toronto, the film-exhibition conference ShowCanada in Halifax, and the Blue Mountain Film + Media Festival in Ontario cottage country.
And of course, the Canadian Academy faces the same financial challenges that have racked so many of this country’s arts institutions.
“It’s a volatile landscape, but we’re in a sound financial position,” Frick says. “Right now there’s a feeling of rebuilding. We see the future as being a lot brighter.”
Canadians – or at least as many as the CBC can hope to rope in next Friday night – will be watching intently.