Awards Season 2022 Begins
by Ralph Lucas – Publisher
(December 15, 2021 – Toronto, ON) The new year is a little more than two weeks away. With the announcement earlier this week of the somewhat sullied Golden Globe Awards, the 2022 Awards Season has begun and as we usually do around this time, here’s a look ahead at some of the more important ceremonies in what is an ocean of award granting organizations.
First up, today’s the day online nominations begin for the Theatrical Feature Film and Television category for the Directors Guild of Canada. The nominees will be announced January 27, 2022 and the 74th Annual DGA Awards will be held March 11. Similar deadlines exist for television, first-time feature director and documentary awards. This is a members only event and there is more information online.
ICYMI, a few days ago The New York Film Critics Circle announced their best films. Lady Gaga received Best Actress of 2021 for her work in Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci. Benedict Cumberbatch was named Best Actor for The Power of the Dog and the Best Film went to Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car. The three-hour (!!!) dramatic epic won Best Screenplay at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.
Back to the tarnished Golden Globes. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), the organization behind the awards, is in a bit of a bind. NBC has announced it will not air the Golden Globes in 2022, but the HFPA is going ahead with its ceremony anyway. Ratings are only part of the problem. The broadcast on February 28 of this year reached a paltry 6.9 million viewers representing a 63 percent drop from the 2020 broadcast, watched by 18.4 million. The issues are many and as one scribe put it, “the resounding whiteness of its nominees” has been cause for concern for a long time now. The Globes move back to their traditional early date and the ceremony will be held on January 9, 2022.
A few things to watch for as this year dwindles down, the London Film Critics Circle nominations will be announced tomorrow, and the Annie Awards, which honour excellence in animation, will announce their nominations in 37 categories. Their 49th annual awards gala takes place on February 26, although I cautiously suggest the Omicron variant may have something to say about that.
In addition to the Golden Globes on January 9th, the Critics Choice Awards will happen, the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle Awards will take place, and voting for the Screen Actors Guild Nominations ends at 5PM Pacific time.
January 12 is when BAFTA will release its “Longlists” of nominees as well as (that was quick) the Screen Actors Guild Awards. The deadline to submit to the 2022 Leo Awards, a project of the Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Foundation of British Columbia, is January 17th. The Directors Guild of America will announce their nominations on January 27.
We always pay attention to what the Toronto Film Critics Association (TCFA) and Vancouver Film Critics Circle (VFCC) are doing. What makes the TFCA interesting is their $100,000 Rogers prize for best Canadian film. The TFCA will hold their live vote on January 16 at noon, and their gala will be held February 22. The VCFF will announce their nominations (International / Canadian) on February 19, 2022, then they will announce the nternational and Achievement winners on February 26. The remaining award-winners will be celebrated at the VFCC awards ceremony on March 7, 2022. My thanks to Jorge Castillo, the Chair of the VFCC for providing that information.
February 1 marks the start of a new month and the end of Oscar® voting on the nominations. That process began 4 days earlier on January 27. The Oscar nominations will be announced February 8th and that announcement is usually carried on this website as well as just about everywhere else. February 15 is an important date on this side of the border. That’s when The Canadian Screen Awards will announce their 2022 nominees. The month ends with the previously mentioned Annie Awards on February 26th and on February 27th the Screen Actors Guild Awards.
March is Awards Month. Art Directors Guild Awards on the 5th, Film Independent Spirit Awards on the 6th, Costume Designers Guild Awards on the 9th, Directors Guild of America Awards on the 12th, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Film Awards on the 13th, American Society of Cinematographers Awards on the 20th, Writers Guild of America Awards also on the 20th and the biggie, the 94th Academy Awards on March 27th.
April belongs to the Canadian Screen Awards from the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television. Canadian Screen Week launches on April 4th and runs until April 10, which is the Broadcast Gala. Last year COVID-19 put a damper on the entire affair and the streaming awards were less than ideal. With the rise of the latest variant and some startling predictions on where it might be headed, one can only hope that by April 2022 it will have eased and some semblance of normalcy will have returned to what has been a sort of life-on-hold these past two years.
Ralph Lucas is the Founder and Publisher of Northernstars.ca. He began writing about film while in radio in Montreal in the mid-1970s.
