Canadians and the Oscar® – 2019

Canadians and the Oscar® – 2019
by Ralph Lucas & Wyndham Wise

(February 22, 2019) Compared to 2018, which we called “a banner year” for Canadian films at the Academy Awards, this year is good, but not as good. This year, nine Canadians could walk away with coveted Oscar® trophies. In the Best Animated Short Film category, a category that has produced 57 nominations for Canadian filmmakers, this year David Fine and Alison Snowden are nominated for Animal Behaviour, and they’re up against Trevor Jimenez for his film Weekends and Domee Shi for Bao. David Fine and Alison Snowden previously won for Bob’s Birthday in 1994. The most recent win was in 2017 for Canadian animator-director Alan Barillaro and the Pixar short Piper.

In the Best Live Action Short Film category, Jérémy Comte is nominated for Fauve competing against Montreal-born actress and director Marianne Farley for Marguerite, which is her 2nd short film. Canada has won in this category twice before with Christopher Chapman’s A Place to Stand in 1968, and Beverly Shaffer and Yuki Yoshida won in 1977 for their NFB short documentary I’ll Find a Way.

In the Best Production Design category, Canadian Richard Day holds a remarkable record with 20 nominations, winning 7 times for his work on such classic American films as Dodsworth, How Green Was My Valley, A Streetcar Named Desire and On The Waterfront. This year Gordon Sims has been nominated again. His first win was for Chicago, his nomination this year is for Mary Poppins Returns.

The only other category Canadian talent shows up in is Best Sound or Sound Mixing category. The brother of Norma Shearer, Douglas Shearer holds the record in this category with 15 nominations and 5 Oscar® wins including one in the very first year the awards were passed out, 1929 for The Big House. This year the team of Tim Cavagin, John Casali and Canadian Paul Massey are nominated for their work on Bohemian Rhapsody. They’re up against the sound crew for Roma, consisting of Skip Livesay, Jose Antonio Garcia and Canadian Craig Henighan.

Last year was a banner year as it turned out. A total of 13 Canadians were nominated and a small handful of films competed in the feature-length categories including Blade Runner 2049, which snared five Oscar nominations, a record for a Canadian film. It was directed by Denis Villeneuve and starred Ryan Gosling. The animated feature The Breadwinner, a Canada-Ireland-Luxembourg co-production was nominated but did not win, and Christopher Plummer won an Oscar® for Best Supporting Actor (becoming the oldest actor to win an Academy Award) for his work after being parachuted in to replace Kevin Spacey in Ridley Scott’s All the Money in the World.

The big, big, very big win was for Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, which was named Best Picture. It had received two Golden Globes, 13 Oscar and 12 BAFTA nominations and picked up four Oscars® including Best Director and Best Original Score. Shot in and around Toronto and Hamilton, Ontario with a huge crew of Canadian behind-the-scenes talent, the film was produced by del Toro and Toronto’s J. Miles Dale.

Guillermo del Toro has made Toronto his home base for several years now and was in the news earlier this week when Netflix announced plans to establish a production hub in the city and to lease sound stages in part for its forthcoming horror anthology series Guillermo del Toro Presents Ten After Midnight and the feature film Let It Snow.

The 2017 awards season was a mixed bag. As usual pundits looked to The Golden Globes for any sign of what might be in store at the Oscars®. In the category Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, La La Land was a solid contender and walked away with the coveted trophy with the globe on top. Emma Stone took Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy and Canadian actor Ryan Gosling was handed Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. Damien Chazelle won Best Director and Best Screenplay and the film went on to win Best Musical Score and Best Song.

A few weeks later La La Land did not take Best Picture at the Academy Awards and Ryan Gosling lost to Casey Affleck for Manchester by the Sea. We did have two Oscar winners in 2017. Montreal’s Sylvain Bellemare took home an Oscar for Sound Editing for his work on Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival and Alan Barillaro of Chippawa, Ontario won an Oscar for his Pixar-produced animated short Piper.

Canada’s entry in 2017 for Best Foreign Language Film, Juste la fin du monde from Xavier Dolan made it all the way to the December short list, but did not make the final cut for Oscar contention. This year a film virtually no one outside of Québec has seen, Hochelaga terre des âmes by director François Girard was submitted but not nominated.

We haven’t made a submission every year. Our first was Claude Jutra’s Mon oncle Antoine at the 44th Academy Awards in 1971. It would go on to be one of 33 films (so far) entered but not nominated. The first film to be nominated was Denys Arcand’s The Decline of the American Empire in 1986. He was also nominated for Jesus of Montreal in 1989 and won for Les Invasions barbares in 2003. In 2007 his L’Âge des ténèbres made it all the way to the short list. After Arcand, Québec whizkid Xavier Dolan has had three films entered to represent Canada.

Virtually all of the films that have been entered were French, however Deepa Mehta’s 2008 entry, Water, was in English and Hindi and Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner from Zacharias Kunuk was entered in 2001 and was not nominated and it was in Inuktitut.

When the nominations for the 2016 Academy Awards® were announced there was general jubilation in most Canadian film circles. No one jumped up and down but some champaign corks were surely popped when for the first time ever, two… count ’em, two films with Canadian connections ended up on the Best Picture nominee list; Brooklyn and Room, two very different films, both Ireland-Canada coproductions. This was history making. Both films also had their screenplays nominated and both films had their lead actress nominated. Brie Larson for Room and Saoirse Ronan for Brooklyn. American actress Brie Larson won the Best Actress Oscar® and Rachel McAdams picked up a well-deserved nomination for her work in Spotlight, which was partially shot in Hamilton, Ontario. Spotlight was that year’s Best Film.

Other nominations for Canadian filmmakers in 2016 included Adam Benzine for Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy for A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness. They competed against each other in the Best documentary short subject category and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy walked away with the Oscar®.

Toronto R&B singer-songwriter The Weeknd and his Canadian songwriting collaborators Stephan Moccio, Ahmad Balshe and Jason Daheala Quenneville shared an original song nomination for “Earned It” from the film Fifty Shades of Grey. A film shot mostly in Canada, but not a Canadian film nor Canadian co-production, The Revenant, which featured a number of Canadian actors, was nominated in twelve categories including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director and Best Visual Effects. Some of the technical categories included Canadians, such as visual effects artist Cameron Waldbauer, set decorator Hamish Purdy, sound technician Chris Duesterdiek (for sound mixing) and makeup and hair artist Robert Pandini. Paul Massey was also in the Sound Mixing category, nominated for his work on The Martian, and finally, in the Animated Short category, Richard Williams shared his nomination with Imogen Sutton for the short, Prologue.

Fans of Denis Villeneuve kept track of his film Sicario, which was nominated for Best Cinematography, Best Original Score and and Best Achievement in sound editing, but missed on all three

We described 2014 as being a lean year for Canada at the Oscars® and 2015 was essentially an encore performance. With the exception of Québec-born animator and animation director Dean DuBlois whose film How To Train Your Dragon 2 was nominated for Best Animated Feature, there wasn’t much buzz for Canadian filmmakers that year. Unfortunately DeBlois was up against The Boxtrolls, which was co-directed by Sault Ste. Marie-born Graham Annable, and the ultimate winner of the coveted trophy, Big Hero Six, which was co-directed by Chris Williams, who picked up his first Oscar®. Williams was born in the United States, but grew up in Ontario and is a graduate of the animation program at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario. He was previously nominated for the 2008 film Bolt. The other nominees in the animated feature category were Song of the Sea from Tomm Moore and Paul Young, and The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, from Isao Takahata and Yoshiaki Nishimura.

The other winner at the 87th Academy Awards was Oakville, Ontario’s Craig Mann. A graduate of the music engineering program at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, he worked at Toronto’s Casablanca Sound before moving to Los Angeles. He shared his Oscar with Ben Wilkins and Thomas Curley in the Best Sound Mixing category for their work on Whiplash.

In addition to the feature-length animation category, the NFB and Torill Kove were nominated in the Best Animated Short category for her film Me and My Moulton, but the award went to Feast and Patrick Osborne, Kristina Reed.

In 2014, the only nominations Canadians had going into the awards ceremony was for editing Jean Marc Vallée’s Dallas Buyers Club. With a total of six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Vallée himself didn’t end up in the Best Director category. However using the alias John Mac McMurphy, he along with the film’s other editor, Montrealer Martin Pensa, were nominated for editing but didn’t win. The only other nomination was for Toronto’s Andy Koyama who shared a nomination for sound mixing on the film Lone Survivor with sound mixing associates Beau Borders and David Brownlow.

In mid-February of that year, the scientific and technical division of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences met to honour those who had won Academy Awards for their advancement of the craft of filmmaking. The names Tibor Madjar, Colin Doncaster and Yves Boudreault may not mean anything to the average filmgoer, but for those who pay attention to the “Oscars for nerds” this is as prestigious as any other Academy Award. The award itself is not one of those little gold statues, but technical achievement recipients receive certificates while scientific and engineering winners get plaques.

Yves Boudreault was part of the team credited with making “bullet-time” possible in The Matrix, a film that costarred Canadians Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss. Tibor Madjar, who lives in Toronto, was part of the team that came up a new way to sculpt digital models for films including King Kong, James Cameron’s Avatar, Life of Pi and The Avengers. Colin Doncaster is a visual-effects expert who devised an efficient way to merge images in The Day the Earth Stood Still. These three Canadians were among 52 people recognized for 19 scientific and technical achievements at a gala dinner held at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

There has been a Canadian connection to the Academy Awards® right from their beginning. In the late 1920s film was changing as the star system has growing, the large studios became the predominate producers and sound was about to make its debut. It was MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer who came up with the idea for what became the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) in 1927. One of the 36 original founders of the Academy was Toronto-born Mary Pickford, known as America’s Sweetheart. Pickford was also one of the people who voted to approve the design of the Award of Merit, as the Oscar® statuette it is properly known, in 1928. MGM’s art director Cedric Gibbons, another original Academy member, supervised the design of the trophy in 1928. Looking for a model, it was suggested he meet with Mexican-born film director and actor Emilio Fernández. Fernández was at first reluctant but later agreed to pose for the statuette now widely known as Oscar®. The most most popular story of where that name came from involves an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences librarian and future executive director, Margaret Herrick. As the story goes, Herrick, upon seeing the statuette sitting on a table exclaimed “it looks just like my Uncle Oscar!”

Another common story involves actress and two-time Academy Award winner Bette Davis, who reportedly named it after her ex-husband, Harmon Oscar Nelson, Jr. In 1934 Hollywood reporter Sidney Skolsky was apparently the first columnist to use the name when making reference to Katherine Hepburn’s win that year. Walt Disney is also reported to have called it by that name in the

same year at the Awards ceremony. The name stuck and it has been called by that name ever since. In fact, in 1939 the Academy itself began using the name officially.

Back when it all started, the period for eligibility was different. The first awards were handed out on May 16, 1929, to honour films that had been released in Hollywood from the beginning of August 1927 to the end of July 1928. This continued until 1934. With the 7th Academy Awards, held in 1935, the period of eligibility became the full previous calendar year from January 1 to December 31.

At the second gathering, held in 1930, to award films released in 1928/1929 season, Mary Pickford, Toronto-born America’s Sweetheart, was named Best Actress for her role in Coquette. What is often forgotten is Pickford’s role in spearheading the movement to establish the Academy in the first place. Montreal-born, Norma Shearer, wife of MGM’s all powerful production head Irving Thalberg, was nominated that year for Their Own Desire and won the very next year (1929/1930) for her role in The Divorcée. She went on to receive nominations four more times in her career, for a total of six. To complete the trifecta, Cobourg, Ontario-born Marie Dressler won in 1931 for Min and Bill and was nominated a year later for Emma. Remarkably, for the first three years the Best Actress Oscar® was given to three Canadian-born women.

At the 1931 ceremony, not only did Norma Shearer win for The Divorcée, but she shared the stage with her older brother, Douglas, who won an Academy Award that night too. It is the only time in Oscar® history that a brother and sister were awarded on the same night. Douglas Shearer was one of the technical geniuses Hollywood has been able to attract – people with talent

beyond acting and directing, but vital to filmmaking and the creation of magic. His particular genius was sound recording, and later special effects, and his win that year for The Big House was the first of 21 nominations he collected between 1931 and 1945. He won again in 1935 for Naughty Marietta, 1936 for San Francisco, 1940 for Strike Up the Band, 1944 for Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (special effects), in 1947 it was Green Dolphin Street (special effects) and 1951 brought one for The Great Caruso. He was also given an Award of Merit in 1937 and seven Oscars® for scientific and technical achievements.

Other Canadians who won big in the so-called craft categories were two huge talents from Victoria, B.C., Richard Day and Stephen Bosustow. Day, a gifted illustrator, worked with the legendary Erich von Stroheim on Foolish Wives and Greed, films that set a new standard for realistic art direction. He was with MGM from 1923 to 1930, and from 1939 to 1943 he headed the art department at 20th Century-Fox. Day was nominated 20 times for an Academy Award (winning seven), the most ever for an art director. He won for The Dark Angel (1935), Dodsworth (1936), How Green Was My Valley (1941), My Gal Sal (1942), This above All (1942), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and On the Waterfront (1954). Bosustow began working professionally as a cartoonist in the early 1930s. He joined the

Walt Disney assembly line of animators, but in 1945 he and several other disenchanted Disney artists formed United Productions of America (UPA), an animation company that allow its artists greater creative freedom. While president of UPA, he personally produced nearly 100 cartoons, received 11 nominations and won three Oscar® winners – Gerald McBoing McBoing (1950), When Magoo Flew (1954) and Mister Magoo’s Puddle Jumper (1956).

Toronto-born Walter Huston was nominated as Best Actor for his role in Dodsworth and again for The Devil and Daniel Webster (1941) and Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), but all three times he saw the award go to someone else. In the spring of 1947 he starting shooting Treasure of the Sierra Madre under the direction of his son, John Huston, and at the 1949 Academy Awards ceremony he picked up his Oscar® for Best Supporting Actor. John Huston was named Best Director, and the father and son win was another Hollywood first.

During the 1940s, Raymond Massey was nominated for Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1940), Walter Pidgeon for Mrs. Miniver (1942) and Madame Currie (1943), Lucille Watson for Watch on the Rhine (1943), Alexander Knox for Wilson (1944), Hume Cronyn for The Seventh Cross (1944) and John Ireland for All the Kings’s Men (1949), but the 1950s were a long dry spell for Canadians in Hollywood.

We were mostly overlooked through much of the early 1960s as well. Then Norman Jewison’s The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming was nominated for Best Picture in 1966. The following year he was nominated for Best Director, and although he didn’t win (Mike Nichols

took the award for The Graduate), In the Heat of the Night remains one of the most powerful pieces of filmmaking to come out of Hollywood. In the Heat of the Night won Oscars® for Best Picture, Best Actor (Rod Steiger), Best Sound (Samuel Goldwyn Studio), Best Editing (Hal Ashby) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Sterling Silliphant). In 1972, his production of Fiddler on the Roof earned him nominations for Best Director and Best Picture, and again in 1987 Monstruck earned him those two nominations. Cher won her Oscar® for that film. Jewison’s A Soldier’s Story was nominated for Best Picture in 1985, but Amadeus was the winner, and the following year Agnes of God picked up three nominations, including Best Actress (Anne Bancroft), Best Original Score and Best Supporting Actress for Meg Tilly. In all, films directed by Norman Jewison have been blessed with 45 Academy Award nominations, winning 12; however, personally, he remained winless after seven separate nominations. In 1999, he was presented with the Irving G. Talberg Memorial Award for his contributions to the art of cinema.

There were no Canadian winners in the acting categories during the 1970s and 1980s, although we did pick up a few nominations: Geneviève Bujold for Anne of the Thousand Days (1969), Chief Dan George for Little Big Man (1970), Dan Aykroyd for Driving Miss Daisy (1989), Graham Greene for Dances with Wolves (1990) and Kate Nelligan for Prince of Tides (1991). Then in 1993 there was an audible gasp, followed by thunderous applause when child actor Anna Paquin was named Best Supporting Actress for The Piano. She was not quite 11 years old. Listed in many film directories as being born in New Zealand, Paquin was born July 24, 1982, in Winnipeg, Manitoba. In 1995, Jennifer Tilly (older sister of Meg) was nominated for Bullets over Broadway.

In the Adapted Screenplay category, Mordecai Richler and Lionel Chetwynd where nominated for The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz in 1975, and in the Original Screenplay category, Ted Allan was nominated in 1976 for Lies My Father Told Me, but the award went to Dog Day Afternoon and the American writer Frank Pierson. In the Musical Score category, Toronto’s Howard Shore won three times for his work on The Lord of the Rings trilogy, twice for Best Score and once for Best Song. The Red Violin won for Best Score in 2000.

Art-house darling Atom Egoyan found himself with both Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay nominations for The Sweet Hereafter in 1998, the only time a Canadian director has been nominated in the Best Director category for a Canadian film. Ironically, that same year, James Cameron, from Kapuskasing, Ontario, won three Oscars® for Titanic, Best Picture, Best Director and Best Editing, the only time a Canadian-born director has won in those categories. The film was nominated for 14 Academy Awards, and won 11.

Recently, the Canadian Oscar® golden boy was London, Ontario-born Paul Haggis. The prolific writer/director was nominated five times over three consecutive years beginning in 2005 with a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay for the Clint Eastwood film, Million Dollar Baby. In 2006 he was nominated for Best Original Screenplay for Crash in addition to a Best Director nomination. In 2007 he was up for Best Original Screenplay for Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima.

In 2007, Deepa Mehta’s Water was nominated for Best Foreign-Language Film (it was shot in Hindi with English subtitles), a category in which Canadian films have had past success. Deny Arcand’s The Barbarian Invasions won in 2004, and Arcand was nominated for Best Original Screenplay. He was also nominated for Jesus of Montreal in 1990 and The Decline of the American Empire in 1987. In 1978, A Special Day, a Canada/Italy co-production starring Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni (who received a Best Actor nod) was also nominated in the foreign-language category. In 1981, Atlantic City, a Canada/US/France co-production, was nominated for Best Picture, the first time a Canadian film competed in that category.

In other, less high-profile categories, Canadians have done very well over the years. The National Film Board has received dozens of Oscar® nominations for animation, short films and documentaries. Norman McLaren was first to win for his NFB short, Neighbours, in 1952. In 2007 The Danish Poet, directed and animated by Torill Kove was given an Oscar®. Canadians have also done well in the documentary category. There have been three feature-length winners: The Man Who Skied down Everest in 1976, Just another Missing Kid in 1983 and Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got in 1987.

In 2008, Oscar® nominations included Julie Christie and Ellen Page together in the Best Actress category. Christie was nominated for her work in the Sarah Polley film, Away From Her, and Ellen Page for her work in the hit film, Juno. Sarah Polley was nominated for her adapted script for Away From Her which was based on an Alice Munro short story.

Canadian-born Jason Reitman was nominated for a Best Director award for helming Juno, and the film itself, although technically not a Canadian production, had been nominated in what is considered to be the top category, Best Picture. While not Canadian, actor Viggo Mortensen was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his leading role in the David Cronenberg film, Eastern Promises and American writer Diablo Cody was nominated for her screenplay for Juno.

Rounding out 2008 were nominations for two films in the animated short category. One was I Met The Walrus and the other was the National Film Board’s beautiful short, Madame Tutli-Putli, which was the NFB’s fourth nomination in as many years. Neither won. Another disappointment in 2008 came with the news L’Âge des ténèbres had not made the final cut in the Best Foreign Language film nominations. And when it was all over, despite a bumper crop of nominations, there were no awards for Canadian actors, directors or movies that year.

In 2009 we were able to grab just one nomination. Chris Williams, who was born in Kitchener, Ontario, was a co-director on Bolt, which had been nominated in the Best Animated Feature category.

Despite multiple nominations for James Cameron’s Avatar at the 2010 Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director, the film ended up with only three of the highly coveted golden statuettes, winning for Art Direction, Cinematography and Visual Effects. Cameron had been up against an impressive field of directors including fellow Canadian Jason Reitman whose picture, Up in the Air was also in the running for an Oscar®. But neither of them got the nod as Kathryn Bigelow won for The Hurt Locker, which took six of the nine categories it had been nominated in, including Best Picture. As the night wore on it became clear it was going to be a shut-out for Canada.

In 2011, Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies was up against films from Algeria, Denmark, Greece and Mexico. There was a lot of buzz around the Mexican entry,