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Members of the TFCA met on the afternoon of December 14 to vote on their choices. In addition to Boyhood, the membership also named its three finalists for the highly coveted Rogers Best Canadian Film Award. They include Enemy, directed by Denis Villeneuve; The F Word, directed by Michael Dowse; and Mommy, directed by Xavier Dolan. The winner of that award will be announced at the association`s annual gala dinner on January 6. It carries with it not just the honour of being named Best Canadian Film, but a cash award of $100,000, which is the richest film award in the country. The runners-up will each receive $5,000.
“In an exceptional year for Canadian cinema, we’ve chosen three boldly directed films that are so dissimilar it’s almost hard to believe they’re set in the same country,” said TFCA President Brian D. Johnson. “Enemy’s austere psychodrama portrays Toronto as a smog-lined tomb of condos and concrete, while The F Word makes the city a bright, airy playground for an agile romantic comedy. And in Mommy a drama of mental illness and parental anguish rips through a household in working-class Montreal.”
Other awards that were announced include The 2014 Joe Fresh Allan King Documentary Award, which was given to The Overnighters. The doc`s director Jesse Moss will receive a $5,000 cash prize. The prize is named after the late, renowned director Allan King.
Albert Shin, director of the South Korean domestic drama In Her Place, was named the winner of the Scotiabank Jay Scott Prize for an emerging artist. He will be presented with a $5,000 cheque at the gala. Finally, the TFCA will also announce the winner of the Manulife Student Film Award, which also carries a $5,000 cash prize. It is presented to a short film that the critics select from student entries submitted by film programs at Humber College, Ryerson University, Sheridan College and York University.
Under the TFCA’s guidelines, contenders eligible for the awards include films released in Canada in 2014 plus films that qualify for the 2014 Oscars and have Canadian distribution scheduled by the end of February 2015. Other awards that were announced include:
Tom Hardy won the Best Actor prize for playing a Welsh builder in crisis in Locke.
Marion Cotillard was named Best Actress for her performance as a Polish woman navigating 1920s America in The Immigrant
J.K. Simmons was named Best Supporting Actor for his role as a tyrannical conductor in Whiplash.
Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel won for Best Screenplay
Isao Takahata’s delicate fable The Tale of the Princess Kaguya won Best Animated Feature.
Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox was named Best First Feature’
Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure was named Best Foreign-Language Film.
It had been previously announced that the 2014 recipient of the Technicolor Clyde Gilmour Award is Piers Handling of the Toronto International Film Festival, who will present a filmmaker of his choice with $50,000 worth of services from Technicolor. The TFCA Awards gala will take place in the art-deco Round Room of Toronto`s historic The Carlu. |
