11th Canadian Screen Awards

The 11th Canadian Screen Awards, presented by the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television, honoured achievements in Canadian film, television and digital media production in 2022.^[1] The ceremonies were held at Meridian Hall in Toronto from April 11–14, 2023, as part of Canadian Screen Week. Highlights of the ceremonies aired in a CBC Television special on April 16, 2023, hosted by Samantha Bee.

Nominees for all awards were announced on February 22, 2023. Brother led the film nominations, with 14 nods, while the CBC/BET+ drama The Porter led in television with 19 nods.^[2] Brother and The Porter would each win 12 awards, including the awards for best motion picture and dramatic series respectively.

After being held as a virtual event every year since 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the 2023 Canadian Screen Week festivities returned to being an in-person event. Genre-specific awards galas were hosted at Toronto's Meridian Hall from April 11–14.^[3]

Television coverage would consist of an hour-long special hosted by comedian Samantha Bee, which premiered April 16 on CBC Television. The special featured highlights of the non-televised galas, segments highlighting the special award recipients, and the results of the Audience Choice award vote.^[3] The previous year's ceremony used a similar format accompanying a series of streaming presentations throughout the week, but the results for top categories were reserved for the CBC special.^[4]

The new format was described as an attempt at making an entertainment-oriented special, given the ratings difficulties that traditional awards show telecasts have faced in recent years: producer Roma Ahi stated that there would be "more emphasis this time on storytelling than there would be during a live show where audiences are watching to see what people are wearing, what is said during acceptance speeches". Ahi's partner Katie Lafferty added that "we have to be entertainment-first, and the fun is in gathering what those moments could be from the various in-person ceremonies that happen earlier in the week."^[4]

The decision faced mixed reactions from several actors and filmmakers, most notably Eugene Levy, who felt that their achievements could potentially be overlooked (notwithstanding that even the live telecasts were unable to feature every single award due to time constraints).^[5][4]

In August 2022, the academy announced that it would discontinue its past practice of presenting gendered awards for film and television actors and actresses; beginning in 2023, gender-neutral awards for Best Performance were presented, with eight nominees per category instead of five.^[6] Some of the other acting categories, notably those for guest performance, youth performance in children's programming, television films and web series performance were already gender-neutral.^[7]

Other changes included the introduction of new categories for Best Original Music in a Documentary, Best Original Song in Television, Best Picture Editing - Children's or Youth and Best Writing - Pre-School, the splitting of television music and sound categories from a simple fiction/non-fiction distinction into several new categories for particular genres of fiction and non-fiction programming, and the introduction of a revised jury process for the John Dunning Best First Feature Award.

Recipients of the academy's special awards were announced on January 18, 2023.^[8]

• Board of Directors Tribute - Paul Pope, Jennifer Podemski
• Academy Icon - Catherine O'Hara
• Changemaker Award - Tracy Moore
• Earle Grey Award - Peter MacNeill
• Gordon Sinclair Award - Lisa LaFlamme
• Humanitarian Award - Ryan Reynolds
• Lifetime Achievement Award - Pierre Bruneau
• Radius Award - Simu Liu

One major category is currently presented without regard to the distinction between film, television or web media content.

Reception to the television special for the ceremony was mostly negative.^[9][10]

Barry Hertz of The Globe and Mail called it "humourless, dispiriting, condescending, and ultimately disrespectful to anyone who was nominated or won an award". He wrote that "the program focused not on the actual nominees and award-winners, but a random assortment of Canadian stars who found fame in the United States. While I don’t begrudge the Canadian Academy from shoehorning in some familiar names via its “special awards” to goose excitement, the structure of how they were included Sunday night was shameful. There is a distinct difference between using Humanitarian Award winner Ryan Reynolds and Radius Award winner Simu Liu as Trojan Horses to get audiences aware and interested in actual Canadian film and television, and simply giving those actors gobs of screen time instead of, say, Clement Virgo's film Brother (which won a remarkable 12 awards) or the CBC series The Porter (which dominated the television category with 12 statuettes of its own). Given that there are almost 150 awards categories spread out across the CSAs, you would think that the producers of Sunday's show would deign to include acceptance speeches from a few dozen of them. But instead, we got stingily edited packages of brief messages from the winners, inserted almost as a courtesy. I'm positive that the CSAs included more clips of Liu's Marvel movie Shang-Chi than Brother."^[9]

On Elamin Abdelmahmoud's radio show Commotion the following day, cultural critics Kathleen Newman-Bremang and Jesse Wente also criticized the television special as a failure, with Newman-Bremang criticizing the fact that the special had largely failed to clearly communicate who won what awards, and Wente stating that it felt like a preview trailer for the real awards ceremony.^[10]

• Canadian Screen Awards