For its second consecutive airing of the Genie Awards (March 21), CHUM Television is pulling out all the stops to try to make the show an Oscars-style event for Canadian viewers. But how will the broadcaster draw eyeballs when the public is largely unfamiliar with most of the nominated films, the star power is limited and the country’s audience is clearly divided along language lines?

Certainly CHUM has its work cut out for it.

Of the films nominated for best picture, the copros Being Julia and The Triplets of Belleville are clearly world-class, as Oscar nominations will attest. Love, Sex and Eating the Bones is an underdog, whereas Mémoires affectives and Ma vie en cinémascope are simply question marks in English Canada, where most of the Genies’ target audience lies. Meanwhile, despite the preponderance of French-Canadian nominees in many categories this year, the show might not be very relevant in Quebec on the heels of the province’s own awards, the Prix Jutra, which took place on Feb. 20, spotlighting many of the same nominees.

So how will CHUM deal with the hand it has been dealt, on this, the Genie Awards’ 25th anniversary?

CHUM’s Marcia Martin, executive producer for the Genie Awards, says the broadcaster will drum up support with an extensive round of promotions around the nominated films through its various media outlets.

‘We are going to try to bring as much focus to the nominees as possible through our programming and Web content,’ she says. ‘We hope to attract 18-49 viewers by repeatedly showing them clips of the films, in the same way that movies are normally promoted for theatrical release.’

As with last year, the show will air on CHUM’s Citytv Toronto and Vancouver, Bravo!, Star!, Alberta Access and Quebec’s MusiMax (of which CHUM is a 50% owner) for maximum national penetration. The program will also be on ASN in the Maritimes. It will run live on all stations except in Vancouver, where the show, which begins at 8 p.m. at Toronto’s Metro Convention Centre, will be tape-delayed until 8 p.m. local time.

For the French-language market, MusiMax will air a live preshow one hour before the main event.

‘The live show will then be picked up in English, but during certain breaks, MusiMax will do French-language cut-ins to explain what’s been happening,’ Martin says.

Last year, as Martin points out, CHUM’s Genie telecast matched the average-minute audience of CBC’s broadcast the year before, despite the pubcaster’s wider distribution, and CHUM doubled the number of viewers in the important moviegoing demographic of 18-34-year-olds.

To promote the show in English Canada, a 30-second CHUM-produced Genie trailer began screening in 1,700 Canadian movie houses on Feb. 18. Meanwhile, the caster is airing 60-second vignettes profiling the best picture, actor and actress nominees, and will run a one-hour special called The Genies at 25, featuring clips from the previous award shows, on various CHUM stations one week before the event. And watch for various Genie-themed stories on CHUM’s Startv, MT-MovieTelevision, Star!NewsWeekend and CityPulse. CHUM’s station websites will provide a further promotional push.

Startv’s Oscars-style red-carpet interview segment prior to the awards presentation will look to build viewer interest. The show will for the second year adopt a banquet setting à la Golden Globes.

This is all part of the new approach promised when CHUM took over the Genies from CBC, which had broadcast the lion’s share of the shows since 1980. While Scott Thompson brought as much irreverence to his hosting duties last year as one would expect from a Kids in the Hall alum, CHUM says it is dedicated to making this year’s show even livelier, with comedienne Andrea Martin (who happens to be Marcia’s sister) taking over as emcee.

It is an appropriate choice for the anniversary installment, as Martin cohosted the first-ever Gemini Awards in 1986 with SCTV cohorts Dave Thomas and Eugene Levy. Martin, who was unavailable for comment, is currently performing on Broadway in Fiddler on the Roof.

‘I do happen to know Andrea,’ says CHUM’s Martin jokingly. ‘She was initially hesitant to do the Genies only because she’s onstage six nights a week. Fortunately, we were able to work around her schedule.’

At press time, CHUM’s writers were still fleshing out details for the show, and guest presenters had yet to be announced. Martin says that her sister ‘will certainly do something at the top of the show, but we haven’t confirmed the other content yet.’ The program will celebrate the Genies’ milestone birthday by airing clips from the past quarter century of Canuck films – but not too many of them.

‘We want to focus on this year’s films, which is why the anniversary clips won’t dominate the show,’ Martin explains.

-www.chumlimited.com