OTTAWA — The Necessities of Life took flight on Tuesday with a leading eight Genie nominations, as organizers announced their picks at the Canada Aviation Museum.

The Benoît Pilon movie about an Inuit with tuberculosis, filmed in French and Inuktitut, is up for best motion picture, director, original screenplay, costume design, original music, best lead actor for Natar Ungalaaq, best supporting actress for Eveline Gélinas and best editor for Richard Comeau.

Close behind is Yves-Christian Fournier’s Everything Is Fine, about a teenager struggling with his friend’s suicide, with seven nominations including best picture. Passchendaele, Fugitive Pieces and Mommy is at the Hairdresser’s follow with six nominations each.

The other nominees for best picture — unveiled by last year’s best actor winner Gordon Pinsent and Quebec singer and actress Caroline Néron — are Amal, Normal and Passchendaele. Pilon and Necessities came close but missed a foreign-language nomination for this year’s Oscars, making it to the nine-title shortlist but not the final five.

Passchendaele, a box-office smash and shoo-in for the Golden Reel award, also earned an acting nomination for its do-it-all star Paul Gross, though he missed in both the directing and writing categories. Directing nods instead went to Pilon, Richie Mehta for Amal, Lyne Charlebois for Borderline, Carl Bessai for Normal and Yves-Christian Fournier for Everything Is Fine.

Pinsent paused when announcing Kristin Booth as a nominee for best supporting actress for her role in the controversial Young People Fucking. He uttered the first two words of the movie’s name, but Néron had to finish off, explaining ‘Gordon didn’t want to use that word.’

‘Imagine what the sequel will be called,’ Pinsent joked, with a model of the Silver Dart, one of the first motorized airplanes, hanging over his head.

The theme of the 29th Genie Awards is ‘Canadian film takes flight,’ and the backdrop of the awards show, to be broadcast on Global Television, will be the museum’s airplanes. Part of the museum will be converted into an auditorium that will hold up to 800 guests for the April 4 gala. It is the first time the awards show, a mainstay in Toronto, will be in Ottawa.

Sara Morton, CEO of the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, which runs the Genies, said it makes sense for a national celebration of Canadian film to take place in the nation’s capital, stressing that the city’s bilingualism will help include titles and filmmakers from French Canada.

‘We’re going to fill the house, without question,’ she noted.

The museum and the National Capital Commission in conjunction with the Academy are planning a Genie Week in the lead-up to the awards ceremony. Details of these plans will be announced over the next few months, and will likely include special screenings.