Awards Season 2020
by Ralph Lucas – Publisher
(December 3, 2019 – Toronto, ON) The awards season seems to come early this year. If you’re a fan of awards shows, this is an early take on what your calendar may look like. The first hint of the coming onslaught of award ceremonies, broadcast or not, takes place tomorrow December 4 in a rather subdued (by comparison) affair. That’s when members of the New York Film Critics Circle meet and vote on their list of winners. The New York Film Critics Circle Awards Gala will be held on January 7.
Things ramp up a bit next Monday, December 9 when the Hollywood Foreign Press Association announces the nominees for its 2020 Golden Globe Awards. The awards ceremony itself will take place on Sunday January 5th at the Beverly Hills Hilton in Los Angeles. Love him or hate him, Ricky Gervais is back to host the Golden Globes for a record fifth time.
Also on December 9 look for the Art Directors Guild Award nominations to be announced and the very next day the Costume Designers Guild Award nominations will be announced. If this seems like a lot of U.S. news, that’s just the nature of the beast, the beast being the size and international clout of the American movie industry.
On Wednesday, December 11 the Screen Actors Guild Awards will announce their 2020 nominations and on the following Monday, December 16 the Oscars® shortlists will be announced and voting begins on January 2. Voting ends just 5 days later and the results of that voting will produce the final list of nominees will be announced on Monday January 27th. As in past years, Northernstars plans to carry that announcement live from Los Angeles. The Oscars® telecast takes place on Sunday, February 9. In Canada, CTV will carry the show again this year.
Last year we wrote about the decline in award show viewers, writing, “…TV’s three biggest awards shows — the Oscars, Grammys and Golden Globes — lost 14 million viewers between them, a stunning 18 percent decline from their collective haul the previous year.” We haven’t bothered with U.S. stats for 2019, but in Canada, CTV enjoyed 9% growth over 2018 with an average audience of 5 million viewers for the 91st Oscars®.
Back to the calendar, in addition to the previously mentioned New York Film Critics Circle Awards Gala, nominations for both the Producers Guild of America Awards and the Directors Guild of America Awards will be announced. The Producers Guild AWards ceremony is schduled for January 18 and the Directors Guild Awards will be held on January 25. The Screen Actors Guild Awards ceremony will be held on Sunday January 19.
Saturday, February 1 brings both the Art Directors Guild Awards ceremony and the Writers Guild of America Awards ceremony. The next day, February 2, the always posh and always important BAFTA Awards will be handed out. In case you’re new to all this, BAFTA stands for the British Academy of Film & Television Arts.
On February 18 the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television will release their list of nominees for the 2020 Canadian Screen Awards. The awards ceremonies and related events span what its called Canadian Screen Week, which this year begins on March 23 and ends with the broadcast gala on Sunday, March 29. And with that the 3 month awards season draws to a close. A couple of outliers include the Gala Québec Cinéma on June 7th and Daytime Emmy Awards which will expand from two nights to three spanning June 12-14.
Other Canadian film awards we will pay attention to include the TFCA (Toronto Film Critics Association) awards and the VFCC (Vancouver Film Critics Circle) which both announce their choices for recognition usually in early January.
Ralph Lucas is the Founder and Publisher of Northernstars.ca. He began writing about film while in radio in Montreal in the mid-1970s.
