Last night saw the presentation of the 2016 Canadian Screen Awards and it is probably no surprise to anyone that Room ended up being the big winner of the night, taking away 9 of its 11 nominations, including Best Picture and Achievement in Directing for Irish director Lenny Abrahamson. Probably, the biggest surprise among Room‘s wins was nine year old Jacob Tremblay winning the Best Actor award, over the likes of Christopher Plummer and Rossif Sutherland.
This was my first year making predictions for the Canadian Screen Awards and I ended up getting an even 12 out of 24 awards correct. One of my mistakes was not realizing how dominant Room was going to be, with the film also picking up the bulk of the technical categories it was nominated for. However, one mistake that I ended up being pleasantly surprised by was Sleeping Giant actor Nick Serino winning the Best Supporting Actor prize over my prediction of My Internship in Canada‘s Irdens Exantus.
The Canadian Screen Awards ceremony was broadcast live on CBC television from the Sony Centre for the Performing Acts in Toronto and was hosted by Canadian-born Saturday Night Live alumnus Norm MacDonald. While I believe that the opening monologue by MacDonald came off as somewhat awkward, one gag of his that worked throughout the night is his insistence that the Canadian Screen Award should be nicknamed “The Candy,” in honour of John Candy. While it initially seemed that this name was only going to last for the first award, it eventually stuck and it will be interesting to see if this nickname becomes official.
Overall, my first experience with the Canadian Screen Awards was a fairly positive one. Unlike the Oscars, all the technical awards were presented prior to the telecast, so the two hour ceremony focused primarily on the major film and TV awards and only ended up running long by about six minutes. If only the Oscars can learn from that.