Observers may have a hard time differentiating between this year’s Genie Awards and the Prix Jutra, the Quebec film awards that were handed out Feb. 20 in Montreal.

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Followers of Canadian film scratched their heads when this year’s Genie Award nominees for best actress were announced and Annette Bening’s name was not heard, despite the fact that her film Being Julia is up for best motion picture. At the root of this seeming contradiction is a complicated rule drawn up by the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, which runs the awards.

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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?

While CHUM will be doing all it can to promote this year’s nominees before and during the awards broadcast, to be emceed by SCTV alum Andrea Martin, the program will also look back on the Genies’ first 25 years.

Ottawa: Producers and other stakeholders came to Prime Time in Ottawa 2005, the CFTPA’s annual conference (Feb. 2-4), to hear from the two government mandarins who hold the most direct sway over the industry. What they got from Minister of Canadian Heritage Liza Frulla and Telefilm Canada executive director Wayne Clarkson were some reasons for optimism as well as some controversy.

After four months on the job as CBC’s executive VP in charge of English television, Richard Stursberg is asking the federal government for $84 million to get back some of the regional glory of the public broadcaster.
In an address to the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage Feb. 3, Stursberg said he wants to speed up the pace of change at the CBC to deal with the crisis in Canadian drama, to strengthen the regional roots of CBC TV, and to renew CBC’s commitment to news, children’s, sports and cultural programming.

Vancouver: With his audience numbers in steady decline, Canada’s busiest and longest-running television coroner is getting a new job and new series this fall on CBC.
Dominic Da Vinci, played by actor Nicholas Campbell for seven seasons so far, will move from Da Vinci’s Inquest to become Vancouver’s mayor in the sequel Da Vinci’s City Hall – a move identical to that of the character’s inspiration, Larry Campbell, Vancouver’s former chief coroner and current mayor.