How Do We Get Nominated?

Q. There are some 7 festivals where in your screening leads to eligibility for Independent Spirit award. What is the next step? I mean after eligibility how do we proceed towards nomination?

I was tempted to dismiss this question because the answer seemed so obvious: you find the awards website and download the submission form. You pay the fee and submit your film.

But if someone's asking this question, it's because they don't know how. And if you didn't know, how would you easily find out? (Ask a blogger, apparently.)

So yeah, you have to submit your film to awards. Even the Academy Awards, I think. And there's usually a fee. It's assumed that if you're a producer, you have the money to submit your film to the various awards you want your film to win.

Working Title: The Sorries

Had a great time at the WGC Quebec's semi-annual free drinks get-together. We decided that since everyone in Toronto wants to visit Montreal, but only when everyone else in Toronto is here, we should pick an official weekend for Torontonians to visit.


Then the suggestion was put forward of an awards ceremony. But not just any awards ceremony. We already have the Genies and the Geminis and the Jutras and even more regional awards. These would have to be national awards. But what American award ceremony haven't we ripped off? Those'd have to be the Razzies, eh?


Ah, the Razzies: the award for the most spectacularly bad Screenplay, Direction, Performance in a Leading Role, etc. But you couldn't just vote someone a Canadian Razzie: that would be rude. No, people would have to submit their own films, by way of apology for their awful work, or the awful job that was done to their work. An award, if you will, by way of apology. Fortunately, Canadians are just self-loathing enough to do it. After all, if you write a real stinker, and you submit yourself for a Canadian Razzie, you're cool. If you don't, you're just the writer of a stinker. (As someday it may happen, I've got a little list, myself. But I'm not going to sing about it.)


And the name of these awards, to be doled out at a ceremony at, probably, McKibbins Pub, some time around the Montreal Film Festival -- whichever one we have left, that is -- shortly before the parties at TIFF? Why, inevitably, the SORRIES. Sorry is, after all, our national motto, isn't it?

So I'm putting you on notice, McGrath, Eriksen, Mohan, Fenn, KMac, etc. There will be a party in Montreal, some time towards the end of the summer. Sorries will awarded. We'll just have to work out a protocol for submissions and voting, but I'm sure Maureen can fill us in on that. Be ready to book your travel.

Nice

I hear that BON COP won a bunch of Canadian Comedy Awards, including one for writing..

Thanks for the heads up, Deej!

PS: Here's exactly what the article says about the movie:

Bon Cop Bad Cop topped the film category, capturing three of the four awards in that section: best direction for Eric Canuel, male performance for Patrick Huard and a writing nod.

Notice anything?

What Do You Know?

Deej was kind enough to give me the heads up that the other writers of Bon Cop and I are nominated for a Canadian Comedy Award (PDF). The awards are given out October 12 in lovely London, Ontario.

I Still Don't Know How to Tie a Bow Tie

But one of these days I hope to figure it out.

We didn't win the Jutra for Best Screenplay (the only award Bon Cop got was Best Editing, which in context is a sort of backhanded award), but I can really say I was delighted just to be nominated. The Jutras are, after all, the awards for Québec's French cinema.

The Steadicam guys seemed to cluster near me -- I was on the leftmost aisle, two rows back from the front -- so I was on camera a lot, I'm told. (You could see the transmission on giant screens high up, but I couldn't look up at them while the lenses were poking at me, could I?) I can only presume all the exposure was the result of my borrowing Dad's snazzy tux. Almost everyone else had a regular tie on, which makes a tux look like a suit. Which is a drag, because the whole point of a tux is to look like you are dressed up not for work.

In keeping with my habit of posting the thank you speeches I don't get to give, here's my intended Jutra speech, grammatical errors and all:

C'est un honneur d'être parmi vous ce soir.

Je voudrais remercier Kevin et Patrick and Erik d'avoir confiance en moi que je pourrais leur aider avec un scénario déjà super.

Ma femme: sans elle, je ne serais rien.

Mon agent Nathalie Brunet: sans elle, je ne ferais rien.

Et surtout la publique Québecoise, qui nous a permis d'effacer la honte que le premier film du box office canadien, depuis '82, était Porky's.

I contemplated the past subjunctive for that last ... shouldn't it be fusse? or something? But that just goes to show you what a hopeless combination of academic knowledge and ignorance is my French.

(My favorite sentence I ever worked out is: Que vouliez-vous que je foutasse? Still haven't had cause to use it. )

Well. Next year in Jerusalem, as we like to say. (Not to be confused for actual travel plans.)

Thank You, Thalia

I was pleased to hear from several friends that Bon Cop / Bad Cop won Best Picture at last night's Genie Awards. (The Genies are Canada's Academy Awards.) Maurie Richard: The Rocket swept most of the other awards. Sunday, I'm off to the Jutra Awards (French Canada's Academy Awards) to see if the screenplay picks up an award.

I got some even better news yesterday, too , since you cannot trade honors for food: Telefilm has funded further development on my spec feature Medieval. That ought to keep us in extra cheese pizza for a while. (Zesto's charges extra for extra cheese. "Cheese like gold," says Tarik.) For the past few months I've been feeling officially sanguine about work in the pipeline -- I have something like half a dozen projects that are looking seriously promising, and a few more I could luck out on -- but ever so slightly nervous, 'cause "promising" is another thing you can't eat. This is the first major project to go from promising to paying this year. We'll see what shakes out in the next few months. Thank goodness I got ahead of the game on my pilot, which I hope to finish this week or the next...

THE SPEECH I DIDN'T GET TO GIVE

This is a little presumptuous, but I'm a presumptuous guy, or I wouldn't be in this business, so I thought I'd post the speech I would have given if I had won a Canadian Screenwriting Award on Monday. (I didn't.) I had it all written out on tiny scraps of paper and all:

I'm honored to accept this award. Thank you.

I'm doubly honored because this is the third nomination for our series Naked Josh. I'm not sure which I'm happier about, winning this award, or the fact that this year our show got two out of the three nominations in our class. That’s almost like working on Corner Gas.

I have to share that part of the honor with my co-creator, Laura Kosterski, and our producer, André Béraud, who never accepted less than our best. I'd also like to thank Tara Ellis of Showcase for her outstanding vision in putting her money where our mouths were.

I also feel particularly honored because not only is the Canadian Screenwriting Award given by your peers. But it is one of the few awards in show business that’s based on the work the writer did, and not on what the director and editor and actors did. The Canadian Screenwriting Award is about nothing but the script. Which is a recognition that it all begins with the script. I'm not sure what my point is, but I think it has something to do with a nightmare I had where there was nothing to watch but Canadian Idol five nights a week. And the judges were making up their own jokes.

Finally I'd like to thank you all for letting me be part of our union. In the past few years I've asked the WGC to go to bat for me many times, and each time it's been the difference between a fair outcome and an ugly one. So I am honored simply to be part of this Guild, without which none of this would be possible. Thank you.

And I mean it. Even if I didn't win the award.

AND MORE CHEERY NEWS

I see that Laura Kosterski (my co-creator) and I are nominated for a Canadian Screenwriting Award for our "Naked Josh" pilot. These are the Writer's Guild of Canada's awards.

Well, shucks. That's nice!