Canada’s turn for ‘Schitt’s sweep’
CBC comedy tops the Canadian Screen Awards nominations.
Canada could be in for a “Schitt’s sweep” of its own as beloved CBC comedy “Schitt’s Creek” topped the Canadian Screen Awards nominations on Tuesday.
The Ontario-made series has 21 nominations, including Best Comedy Series plus acting nods for nearly everybody in its make-believe small town, including its four lead cast members, five of its supporting actors and two of its guest stars.
The show made Emmy Awards history in September when it swept all seven comedy categories during the televised awards ceremony. Its nine Emmys in total were the most won by a TV comedy in a single year.
On the movie side of things, Indigenous zombie film “Blood Quantum” has the most Screen Awards nominations with 10, including Best Editing and Original Screenplay for director Jeff Barnaby, and Best Lead Actor for Michael Greyeyes.
It’s the story of a plague that infects non-Indigenous people outside a fictional First Nations reserve. It hit on-demand and digital platforms last May, just as the COVID-19 pandemic ramped up.
Barnaby told The Canadian Press that having an Indigenous horror film and a sitcom with LGBTQ representation as the top Canadian Screen
Awards nominees shows the diversity of the Canadian screen industry.
“I find it cool,” he said Tuesday.
“I’m always a little paranoid of seeing growth in an industry that has been cemented in its ways for so long. But seeing it get acknowledged like this does two things: it blows the doors off horror, which I feel like is our best export here in Canada, and Indigenous film as being a commercially viable commodity.”
“Schitt’s Creek,” which ended its run last April after six seasons, has been racking up awards since it went off the air. It won two Golden Globes in February, for Best Musical or Comedy TV Series and for lead actress Catherine O’Hara. Last week, it won the Danny Thomas Award for Outstanding Producer of a TV comedy at the Producers Guild Awards.
Co-creators Eugene and Daniel Levy, the real-life father and son who played father and son
Johnny and David Rose in “Schitt’s Creek,” are both up for Lead Actor in a Comedy CSAs, while O’Hara and Annie Murphy, who played mother Moira and daughter Alexis, are competing for Lead Actress.
Supporting Actor and Actress nominations went to Chris Elliott, Noah Reid, Emily Hampshire, Jennifer Robertson and Karen Robinson. Rizwan Manji and Victor Garber also got guest actor nods for the series.
The TV series that got the next highest number of nominations, with 15 each, are two other shows that ended their runs in 2020. CTV’s “Cardinal” and CBC’s “Trickster” are both up for Best Drama Series alongside newcomer “Transplant,” also from CTV, CBC’s “Burden of Truth,” Global TV’s “Departure” and History’s “Vikings.”
It’s an almost all CBC slate in the Best Comedy Series category, with “Baroness von Sketch Show,” “Kim’s Convenience” and “Workin’ Moms” competing against “Schitt’s” and
Crave’s “Letterkenny.”
In the dramatic acting categories, “Cardinal” stars Billy Campbell and Karine Vanasse are once again up for Best Lead Actor and Actress in a Drama for playing police partners in a northern Ontario town, alongside Joel Oulette and Crystle Lightning of “Trickster,” who played mother and son in the Indigenous drama.
“Cardinal” ended its run after four seasons when it ran out of Giles Blunt books to adapt. “Trickster,” based on the “Son of a Trickster” novel by Eden Robinson, was cut short after just one season because of a controversy over co-creator Michelle Latimer’s claims of Indigenous ancestry.
“I feel like the people and the actors, there’s something that has been just ripped from us,” Lightning told The Canadian Press on Tuesday.
“Talk about leaving people wanting more and so excited to have seen something so original and so groundbreaking, and then just to be taken away from them — and then us too, the actors, we’re just like, ‘No, it was so good!’ So it’s definitely bittersweet.”
In total, the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television will hand out 141 trophies in film, television and digital media categories in a seven-part series of presentations streamed live from May 17 through 20.
The Best Picture nominees include “Beans,” about a 12-yearold Mohawk girl coming of age during the 1990 Oka Crisis; Olympic swimmer drama “Nadia, Butterfly”; psychological thriller “The Nest”; “Funny Boy,” about a Tamil boy who grows up gay in Sri Lanka; and “Underground” (“Souterrain”), about a young man who works in a mine that explodes near his hometown.
“Funny Boy” has the secondhighest amount of film nominations with nine, including Best Director for New Delhiraised, Toronto-based Deepa Mehta.
The crime noir “Akilla’s Escape” has eight nominations, including Best Original Screenplay for Toronto-raised director Charles Officer and co-writer Wendy Motion Brathwaite.
The livestreams for the awards will be available on the academy’s website as well as its Twitter and YouTube channels. The presentations will honour last year’s Special Award recipients, including Tina Keeper, Daniel Levy, David Suzuki and the late Alex Trebek.