The 31st annual Genie Award nominations boil down to a battle between the veterans and the young upstarts, with one of Canadian cinema’s most venerated producers squaring off against one of its hottest young filmmakers.
The Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television bestowed 11 nominations on Barney’s Version, the latest passion project of venerable producer Robert Lantos (Sunshine, The Statement, Eastern Promises), including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress.
But close on Lantos’s heels was Denis Villeneuve, whose Incendies which goes head-to-head with Barney’s Version for Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Actress, and Makeup.
Incendies, which was named Best Canadian Film by the Toronto Film Critics Association last month, is an Oscar nominee for Best Foreign-Language Film. Barney’s Version also has one Academy Award nomination, for Best Makeup.
Giamatti’s Genie nomination for Best Actor might help make up for being left out of last month’s Oscar balloting, as may Dustin Hoffman’s Best Supporting Actor nod the absence of any nominees for Incendies means both actors are the front-runners for their respective prizes – unless there’s a surge of support for François Papineau and Alexis Martin as hapless criminals trying to outrun a tragedy in Louis Bélanger’s Route 132.
Also up for Best Picture is 10½, from the Quebec filmmaker who calls himself Podz. A drama about the battle of wills between a teacher and a socially unmanageable ten-year-old, 10½ landed a total of eight nominations including Director, Original Screenplay, Actor, Supporting Actor and Editing. It makes its English Canadian debut on DVD later this month.
The Best Documentary category included a respectable mixture of political and personal work, with Last Train Home, You Don’t Like The Truth: 4 Days Inside Guantánamo and In The Name Of The Family going up against Journey’s End and Leave Them Laughing.
The rest of the nominations read like a crazy quilt, with recognition distributed to films in a fairly uneven and almost nonsensical manner.
Vincenzo Natali’s Splice was nominated for Best Picture and Best Director, but failed to score any recognition for its cast, its screenplay, its makeup or its clever, Cronenberg-spoofing art direction.
The indie drama Trigger landed two Best Actress nominations for its leads, Molly Parker and the late Tracy Wright, but Daniel MacIvor’s script – which gave Parker and Wright their meatiest screen roles in years – went unrecognized, as did director Bruce McDonald.
Peter Stebbings’s underrated, distributor-abandoned Defendor was nominated for Stebbings’s screenplay and both sound awards – but not for Woody Harrelson’s touching star turn as the eponymous avenger.
Jay Baruchel was nominated for his performance in The Trotsky, and Jacob Tierney landed an Original Screenplay nod, but the film was otherwise ignored.
The Academy seemed to be acknowledging last year’s scandal, in which Xavier Dolan’s buzzy debut I Killed My Mother failed to land a single nomination, by throwing Dolan’s sophomore picture Heartbeats nominations for Picture, Director, Cinematography and Supporting Actress – while somehow overlooking the film’s meticulous art direction, which is the one award it might actually have won in a fiercely competitive year. Expect some withering stares from the wunderkind filmmaker if he deigns to appear as this year’s ceremonies, which will be held March 10 at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa.
