Angelica Babiera | Arts Editor
Featured image: Canadian Screen Awards celebrated womanhood in this year’s awards show. | Courtesy of Hello Magazine
The Canadian Screen Awards (CSAs) is an event that recognizes Canadian film, English-language television, and digital media productions, hosted annually by the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television. The CSAs has been recognized as the equivalent awards show to the U.S.’s Academy Awards and Emmy Awards, the U.K.’s BAFTA Awards, Australia’s AACTA Awards, and Ireland’s IFTA Awards.
This year, the CSAs recognized diversity and women more than ever, trumping the Academy Awards. The Oscars only nominated one female director, Greta Gerwig, and was criticized for having a lack of diverse representation, in comparison to the CSAs.
The CSAs acknowledged works with female honours like Maudie, a biopic which follows a female Nova Scotia folk artist named Maud Lewis (Sally Hawkins), who falls in love with a fishmonger named Everett Lewis (Ethan Hawke) while working for him as a lived-in housekeeper. It won seven awards, including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Hawkins won Best Actress for her role, as well as Hawke for Best Supporting Actor.
The Awards also recognized CBC’s Anne, which won for Best Drama Series. Based on the novel Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery, the show is about Anne Shirley, a young orphan seeking love and acceptance in her new community and life, all the while celebrating her womanhood.
Canadian author Margaret Atwood was also honoured with the Academy Board of Director’s Tribute for her literary work and global social impact. She also gave tribute to the #AfterMeToo fund and movement, a Canadian movement established to provide aid to sexual violence support services.
This is but a short list of women who were highly recognized and praised by the CSAs.
Each of the nominees and winners in the CSAs have put in much work and soul in aiming to demonstrate a more diverse array of T.V. shows and films. These individuals are striving to create a world more accepting and open-minded, showing viewers that there are those like them in the industry.
“I think it’s a terrible idea and very disrespectful to nominate a woman, just because she’s a woman. The over-representation of men at the Oscars wasn’t because females weren’t nominated, but the men who were nominated had years of experience over everyone else,” Tom Granger, a third-year Computer Science undergraduate says.
“My point is, the over-representation of women is not because it was done on purpose, I think it was because there hasn’t been enough time for women to gain the same amount of expertise and experience in the field as their male counterparts. It’s simple statistics.”
This is true in every aspect of it—however, there have been a number of films and T.V. shows directed by women and follow women that lacked in the representation and acknowledgement in many awards shows.
Many believe that films such as Selma should should have won an Academy Award, simply due to its outstanding acting and directing, not because it’s a film about Martin Luther King, Jr., or that an African-American woman directed it.
What the CSAs did this year was convey the power and ability of women—something the Academy Awards has not yet done successfully.
