Two hundred and ninety two nominees.
That is the number attached to this year’s Rosie Awards, spread across 50 class and craft categories, in the 52nd year Alberta has been handing them out. The ceremony lands November 7 at the Jubilee Auditorium in Calgary, with Andrew Phung hosting.
The individual stories out of this year’s list have been covered, including a Calgary filmmaker who landed nine nominations of her own. This is the other way to read the same announcement, which is to stand back far enough to see the whole board.
Who led
The most nominated single production this year is In the Pines, a thriller from Meta Films.
Behind it, and more familiar to most Albertans, Heartland took 11 nominations for its nineteenth season. Best scripted series, two directing nods, screenwriting, cinematography, editing, costume design and multiple performance categories. A show shooting its twentieth season around High River is still competitive in craft categories against productions with a fraction of its mileage, which is not the usual pattern for long running drama anywhere.
Worth keeping the two figures separate, because coverage tends to blur them. Heartland’s 11 is one title. The larger numbers circulating belong to production companies counting across several titles at once, which is a different measurement of a different thing.
Edmonton had a very good week
The southern half of the province tends to absorb the coverage. This year the northern numbers are the more interesting ones.
Sticks and Stones drew 12 nominations, most of them for The Secret Longtree Society. Score G Productions took 10, largely on two documentaries, one on Bif Naked and one on Dane Cook. Northern Gateway Films took 8 across My Final Victim and The Speech. Omar Mouallem picked up two, one for a film and one for a podcast, which says something about how the categories have widened.
Add those four together and Edmonton companies alone account for a substantial share of the whole nominee list. There is a version of Alberta’s screen story where everything happens within sight of the Bow, and the nomination sheet does not support it.
What 292 nominees actually tells you
A nomination list is a census of who was working.
Fifty categories means fifty crafts with enough entrants to be worth judging separately, which is not something a small industry can sustain. Costume design, editing, cinematography, sound, music video direction. These are not awards for having a good idea. They are awards for a specific trade, practised at a professional standard, by enough people in this province that a jury had to choose between them.
That is the real signal underneath the gowns and the ballroom. Alberta has been told for a generation that it is a landscape other people come to photograph. A 292 name list in 50 craft categories is the flat rebuttal, and it is compiled annually by people with no motive to flatter anybody.
The gap the Rosies expose
Here is the uncomfortable part. Most Albertans could not name a single one of these productions.
Not because the work is weak. Because there is almost nowhere in this province that covers it week to week. Alberta has an industry organisation, a tax credit, a fifty year old awards programme and 292 nominees, and no publication that follows the sector with any consistency between announcements. The information exists in newsletters, guild lists and trade press based somewhere else.
A province that has decided its screen sector is an economic file rather than a hobby has to cover it like one. That means the crew calls, the funding deadlines, the studio openings and the awards, not just the ceremony photos in November.
The ballots are in. November 7 at the Jubilee.
Can you name a single Alberta production on this year’s list, and if not, whose failure is that?
