The 2024 Canadian Screen Awards rebounded from last year’s disaster – once you could actually hear the show

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History was made twice at the 12th annual Canadian Screen Awards gala, where the country’s bruised and battered but ever-resilient entertainment industry gathered to celebrate the best in homegrown film, television and digital media.

First, Matt Johnson’s excellent comedy, BlackBerry, walked away with a record-breaking 14 CSAs at Friday’s event, besting the previous record-holder, Clement Virgo’s drama Brother, by two statuettes. With wins including best picture, best director, best lead performance (comedy) for Jay Baruchel and best adapted screenplay, BlackBerry swept nearly all of the 17 categories it was nominated for – and deservedly so.

But the bigger moment might have been witnessing the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television, which produces the CSAs, deliver a broadcast that was actually … good? Well, if you could hear it, that is.

In a remarkably embarrassing technical snafu that felt like a Pierre Poilievre-pulled prank, viewers trying to watch the show on CBC Gem were treated to silence for the show’s first five minutes.

This meant that most, if not all, Gem users missed what was a genuinely funny and bouncy monologue from host Mae Martin. The non-binary comedian made a too-predictable joke about BlackBerry being watched on iPhones, but they also got in a sharp enough dig at, well, me, and my anxiety-spiking headline last week about the crisis-prone state of the film and television industry. (I’d offer the excuse that, hey, writers don’t come up with the headlines, but in this case, I did.)

Once the sound finally and mercifully kicked in, the actual broadcast soared. Okay, that’s going too far. Let’s say that it leapt high enough to clear last year’s below-ground bar. Things might have been different if someone at the Canadian Academy managed to finagle a full two hours of air time from the CBC instead of this hyper-condensed 60-minute telecast, which at times felt like chugging back a litre of Clearly Canadian soda without pausing for breath.

Smushing together four days’ worth of separate CSA ceremonies doling out 171 awards – with the bulk of footage coming from Friday afternoon’s two-hour gala held at the CBC Broadcast Centre in Toronto – into a single one-hour telecast was always going to be an impossible challenge. Yet the Ozempic-fied result that made it to air felt as comprehensive as it could possibly be under the honestly insulting circumstances.

Compared with, say, the higher-budgeted U.S. awards shows – or even past iterations of the CSAs, such as the 2016 edition hosted by Norm Macdonald – this might not feel like such a noteworthy achievement. But after the utter disaster of last year’s CSAs – an entirely prerecorded hour that was sloppily edited and headlined by a host who didn’t even deign to step foot inside Canada – this go-around gets graded on a politely Canadian curve.

Martin anchored the show with an energetic, sharp mix of self-deprecation and confidence. The montages were zippy and painless. And producers were gracious enough to include heartfelt acceptance speeches from Reelworld Screen Institute founder Tonya Williams (who won the Changemaker Award) and megastar Denis Villeneuve (the Academy Icon Award), with the Dune director passionately noting that “we must take care of our film industry and make it flourish.”

I’m also more than a little surprised that producers kept the entirety of Queen of My Dreams star Amrit Kaur’s impassioned acceptance speech for winning best lead performance (drama), where she spoke about the war in Gaza.

“For those of you who are telling us artists not to speak up in fear of losing jobs, in fear of losing careers, in fear of losing reputation, you are telling us not to be artists,” the actor said on stage, to a smattering of cheers and an eventual standing ovation by some. “I want to say to you people that I am an artist, and I refuse to sacrifice and live in the hatred of humanity. Ceasefire now. Free Palestine.”

Yet there were a slew of other memorable, deserving-of-air moments that didn’t make it, including the incredibly joyous reaction from the cast of Bria Mack Gets a Life after their Crave show won the award for best comedy series and even a mere snippet from the emotional winners of best drama series Little Bird. Also absent was essentially any real moment from the week’s earlier ceremonies.

(Perhaps more predictably, a joke from Johnson that ironically conflated noxious conspiracy theories about Jewish people controlling the Canadian media and his prolific producer, Niv Fichman – a very sharp, culturally nuanced gag that had Fichman and several others, myself included, in stitches – was cut.)

Ultimately, a one-hour highlights reel is no real way to run an awards show – to say nothing of broadcasting it at 8 p.m. on a Friday night. Perhaps the ratings will prove me wrong, but breathlessly waiting for data-agency Numeris to break good news is an exercise in suffocation.

There also needs to be serious questions asked of the Canadian Academy about timing. This year’s late-May ceremony was an aberration because of a last-minute venue change. But even the typical April CSAs slot no longer makes sense, if it ever did.

Not even I can thoroughly explain the eligibility requirements of nominated films and series. If the CSAs are intended to be a timely celebration of CanCon to boost audience awareness (that is, box-office dollars and ratings), it has turned into a too-little-too-late exercise. Either move the awards to right before or after the Oscars to catch the awards-season energy, or shift to September to catch the buzz, attention and industry activity around the Toronto International Film Festival.

Ultimately, though, this is the CSAs we have – and the CSAs we must continually repair, tweak and sharpen if we want the homegrown industry to succeed. To paraphrase Baruchel’s character in BlackBerry, the CSAs are not the best awards show in the world. But they are the best awards show in Canada.