Latest news with #LisaGilroy
Hamilton Spectator
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Hamilton Spectator
‘Law & Order Toronto' wins best drama series at Canadian Screen Awards
Citytv's 'Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent' won best drama series at Sunday's Canadian Screen Awards. The spinoff draws inspiration from real Toronto crime headlines, reimagining them as fictional investigations. The show led all nominees with 20 nods going into the Screen Awards, but came away with three trophies, including best writing in a drama series and best sound in fiction. The series wrapped its second season earlier this year and has a third season in the works. 'Law & Order Toronto' producer Erin Haskett told The Canadian Press in March that she believes the show is especially resonating with Canadians today because they are craving stories they can relate to. 'Canadians want to see our stories told and want to see characters that reflect ourselves back at us on television,' she says. 'I would say today even more, there's such a sense of wanting to see that reflected back as a country and as a people.' This year's Canadian Screen Awards bash was hosted by Edmonton-born comedian Lisa Gilroy in Toronto, capping off a multi-day celebration of Canadian film, television and digital storytelling. 'The Apprentice,' a Canada-Ireland-Denmark co-production about the early years of U.S. President Donald Trump, won best motion picture. It took home five Screen Awards in total, including best performance in a lead role for Sebastian Stan's turn as Trump, and best supporting actor for Jeremy Strong's portrayal of Cohn. Other major winners included Matthew Rankin's absurdist dramedy 'Universal Language,' and Crave's drag queen competition series 'Canada's Drag Race.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 1, 2025.
Globe and Mail
a day ago
- Business
- Globe and Mail
2025 Canadian Screen Awards cap an uneasy edition by honouring Trump biopic The Apprentice
Kicking off with an obligatory Drake joke and ending with the Canadian entertainment industry sending a message straight to the White House by awarding the dark Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice the Best Motion Picture trophy, the 13th annual Canadian Screen Awards offered enough talking points during its live gala Sunday to fill a 51st state. Before the CBC decides to invent a random hockey game next year to air instead of the 2026 CSAs, The Globe and Mail presents the best, worst, and weirdest moments from Canada's equivalent of the Oscars, Emmys and a couple other award shows squeezed into a single two-hour evening. Comedian Lisa Gilroy possessed the necessary energy and commitment as the evening's host, if not quite the material. While she led with an enjoyably self-deprecating energy ('From the first Canadian Screen Awards hosted by comedy legend Martin short to me, Instagram holder Lisa Gilroy...'), a wan pre-taped sketch featuring actor Will Sasso failed to deliver the humour needed to get the audience immediately on her side. And as the evening stretched on, her gags oscillated between wobbly and desperate. I'll award bonus points for Gilroy's joke about Rumours star Cate Blanchett being in the house (with the camera instead cutting to a mannequin creepy enough to headline its own Guy Maddin movie). But the CSAs, especially in this 'Canada-is-not-for-sale' edition, needed bite. We got baby teeth. While the CSAs arrived in an era of acute geopolitical anxiety – even if no one onstage dared to utter the word 'tariff' – the Academy Of Canadian Cinema & Television voters sure did feel generous toward our U.S. neighbours when it came to doling out the statuettes. American Sebastian Stan took home the Best Performance in a Leading Role (Drama) CSA for his sly performance as Trump in The Apprentice (a Canada/Ireland/Denmark coproduction that was shot in Toronto), while Stan's costar and fellow Yank Jeremy Strong nabbed the Best Performance in a Supporting Role (Drama) in a separate CSAs ceremony Saturday. (Surprise: neither actors were in Toronto to accept.) Meanwhile, Citytv's Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent – a thoroughly Canadian production, albeit one that only exists because of its American mothership – won three CSAs, including Best Drama Series. And though Cate Blanchett is Australian – and excellent – it cannot help but feel strange to see the Rumours star triumph in the Best Performance in a Leading Role (Comedy) category over seven unambiguously Canadian actors. Accepting the award for Achievement in Directing, Universal Language's Matthew Rankin gave the best acceptance speech of the night. First addressing the audience in a succession of English, French, and Farsi, Rankin shared his appreciation for his dual Quebec and Manitoba backgrounds ('Keep Winnipeg weird') before moving on to underline his film's themes. 'Every day, there are new Berlin Walls shooting up all around us. And if our film stands for anything, it stands for how kindness can in fact be a radical gesture,' Rankin said. 'Art can do something that politics can't do. And so I want to salute everyone in this room for the work that you do. To work in culture is to choose community over solitude, and that's very precious.' Although The Apprentice producer Daniel Bekerman gets the unofficial best speech runner-up award, opening his remarks by addressing his (absent) director Ali Abbasi: 'Ali, I told you – you have to come to Canada if you want to find some guts in this industry.' The 2024 CSAs were coming off a horrendous edition that was entirely pre-taped (much of it in New York City), so I was willing to cut the CBC some slack last year when it came to its sparse and rather cheap-looking stage inside the network's Studio 40 in Toronto. But it appears as if the entire set-up was simply recycled for Sunday's show, including the back-breaking fold-up chairs that attendees were forced to sit on. It is no secret that things are tight over at the CBC, but perhaps producers can shake down some of the Dragons' Den benefactors next year to spruce things up. Despite the Blanchett fake-out, there were some genuinely big names in the house Sunday. Hey there to Kiefer Sutherland (appearing unannounced onstage after producers rolled a tribute to his father Donald), Jason Priestley, and a gracious Manny Jacinto (The Good Place, Star Wars: The Acolyte), who was presented with the Radius Award (given to a Canadian film or TV professional who is 'currently making an impact internationally'). Although how fun would it have been if Mike Myers, the most vocal homegrown entertainer out there fighting for Canada's good name, would have popped in, too? Perhaps he was busy filming another Mark Carney ad. While the Canadian academy says that it constantly reevaluates its nomination and voting process every year, this edition's winners – as well as the titles that walked away with little or no hardware – suggests a top-to-bottom overhaul is needed for 2026. How, for instance, did David Cronenberg's The Shrouds – easily the best Canadian film of the year – only leave the CSAs with two awards (for best sound mixing and sound editing)? Meanwhile, Rankin's wonderful comedy Universal Language, the favourite for Best Picture going into Sunday night, was usurped by the Trump drama The Apprentice, which is as big an upset as far as the CSAs typically go. (Although as noted above, Rankin won the best director CSA, one of the six awards that the film scored over the course of a weekend's worth of events.) And then Atom Egoyan's psychological drama Seven Veils, the Canadian filmmaker's strongest work in years, only snagged one award, for best original score. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose, but Cronenberg, Egoyan, and Rankin's latest works are beloved by critics and audiences alike, here and abroad. Giving the three of them something of a cold shoulder feels dispiriting and confounding. Hopefully the members of the now-empty writers rooms that staffed CTV's Children Ruin Everything and CBC's Run the Burbs can find the humour in the fact that their series won top awards despite their shows no longer existing. Run the Burbs star Andrew Phung won Best Lead Performer (Comedy), even though the sitcom aired its last episode more than a year ago, in April, 2024, after getting cancelled in its third season. And while Children Ruin Everything ended after four seasons due to what Bell Media described as creative and not financial reasons, it still felt awkward to see the show win four CSAs (including Best Comedy Series) three months after it aired its series finale.
CBC
a day ago
- Entertainment
- CBC
The 2025 Canadian Screen Awards
Hosted by Lisa Gilroy, honouring the best in Canadian film and television over the past year.
CBC
a day ago
- Entertainment
- CBC
Comedian Lisa Gilroy is tapping into Canada's 'pure creative energy'
Lisa Gilroy was caught off guard when she was asked to host this year's Canadian Screen Awards. "I pushed my team to say yes immediately before they changed my mind, because I couldn't help but feel like it was a mistake that they asked me," she says, adding that she is particularly flabbergasted that her name will be added to a list of hosts that includes Andrea Martin and Martin Short, "people I would absolutely die for." But then again, the Edmonton-born comedian and actress — known for her viral social videos, appearances on comedy streaming service Dropout, and role on Hulu's Interior Chinatown and Prime Video's Jury Duty — kind of feels that way about her whole career. "When doing improv for free leads to real jobs, it's kind of criminally insane," she says. "It takes a lot to wrap your head around it….I'm always just tickled and feeling so grateful for any and every opportunity." Gilroy didn't set out to become a performer. Coming out of high school, she wanted to be a teacher. She enrolled in the University of Alberta's dual Bachelor of Fine Arts/Bachelor of Ed program with the ambition of being a drama teacher. But she found herself drawn to performing, and when she found improv, she fell in love. "It just looked so fun to me," she says. "You know, like, when you see someone doing something that you really want to do and you just get that burn in your belly and you're like, 'Oh, I have to get up there or I'm going to explode.' That's kind of what happened to me when I saw my first improv show. So I hung around at the back stage door and asked, like, how can I watch every show or be in a show? And then I never looked back." From there, she moved to Toronto, performing with long-running sketch comedy troupe the Sketchersons, and then with Second City, before moving on to Los Angeles. It's a career that Gilroy describes as "just kind of a pattern of thinking that I'm never going to do something, and then doing it." Even though Gilroy, like so many Canadian actors, is now based in the United States, she still very much identifies as Canadian. "I'm talking about Canada, probably ad nauseam to all my American friends," she says. "They're aware that that's what makes me who I am." She adds that, working in Los Angeles, she can often tell who's a fellow Canuck. Canadian entertainers, she says "have their own flavour," which comes in part thanks to a different approach to the industry. "I've made a lot of friends [in L.A.] who were child stars or were plugged into the entertainment industry when they were really young, in a way that I just don't think Canada has… we don't have that like toxic energy that sometimes I think American kids, unfortunately, can fall prey to," she says. "That's like, 'My baby's a star. She's going to be in a dishwasher commercial.' If you didn't live in Toronto or Vancouver, you probably didn't even know [working in TV] was a possibility for you growing up. And that's something that I experienced in Edmonton." As a result, she says, Canadians are more inclined to be "creative just for the joy of creating," even after they head to the States. "There's a lot of pure creative energy in Canada that isn't hinging on, like, 'I'm going to start booking TV shows when I'm 14 years old… it feels unfiltered in that way," she says. For her, the Canadian Screen Awards is an opportunity to celebrate that creative energy, as well as our shared cultural identity. "I just think it's a really cool time to be celebrating Canada," she says. "I feel like national pride is in a swell right now, and I couldn't be more excited to be present in the country for that, celebrating at this time when we're having to tell other countries that we're not for sale. I think it's kind of cool when push comes to shove that we're [having] this national pride party, and I'm here for it."
CTV News
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- CTV News
‘Universal Language' leads film contenders heading into Canadian Screen Awards
An absurdist Winnipeg-set fever dream and a millennial identity dramedy are among the leading contenders heading into tonight's Canadian Screen Awards. Matthew Rankin's 'Universal Language' picked up five awards in the film categories at a ceremony over the weekend and will compete for several more tonight, capping off a multi-day celebration of Canadian film, television and digital storytelling. It's vying for the best film trophy against 'The Apprentice,' 'Darkest Miriam,' 'Gamma Rays,' 'Village Keeper' and 'Who Do I Belong To.' Jasmeet Raina's Crave dramedy series 'Late Bloomer' won four awards at a gala for scripted television on Saturday, and is in contention tonight for best comedy series. It's up against CTV's 'Children Ruin Everything,' CBC's 'One More Time' and Crave's 'Don't Even' and 'Office Movers.' Edmonton-born comedian Lisa Gilroy says there's no better time to spotlight homegrown talent as she hosts tonight's Canadian Screen Awards, airing live from Toronto on CBC and CBC Gem. 'I know how hard it is to get TV shows and movies made (in Canada), and I'm so excited to celebrate the stuff that has been made,' she said in an interview earlier this month. 'It is so good and so funny. And we deserve to party.' 'Law & Order Toronto: Criminal Intent,' which led all nominees overall with 20, is up for several trophies tonight. It won two awards on Saturday for best writing in a drama series and best sound in fiction. It will square off for best drama series against CBC's 'Allegiance' and 'Bones of Crows,' Hollywood Suite's 'Potluck Ladies' and CTV's 'Sight Unseen.' 'Law & Order Toronto' actors Kathleen Munroe and Aden Young compete for best lead performer in a drama series against Grace Dove of Crave's 'Bones of Crows,' Mayko Nguyen of Citytv's 'Hudson & Rex' and CBC stars Supinder Wraich of 'Allegiance,' Hélène Joy of 'Murdoch Mysteries, Michelle Morgan of 'Heartland' and Vinessa Antoine of 'Plan B.' 'Universal Language' stars Rojina Esmaeili and Pirouz Nemati are nominated for best performance in a leading comedy film role. They're up against Maïla Valentir of 'Ababooned,' Paul Spence of 'Deaner '89,' Taylor Olson of 'Look at Me,' Emily Lê from 'Paying for It,' Cate Blanchett of 'Rumours' and Kaniehtiio Horn of 'Seeds.' Up for best performance in a leading drama film role are Sebastian Stan of 'The Apprentice,' Oshim Ottawa of 'Atikamekw Suns,' Britt Lower of 'Darkest Miriam,' Carrie-Anne Moss of ':Die Alone,' Chaïmaa Zineddine Elidrissi of 'Gamma Rays,' Sean Dalton of 'Skeet,' Christine Beaulieu of 'The Thawing of Ice,' and Olunike Adeliyi of 'Village Keeper.' In a last-minute programming shift on Thursday, the Canadian Screen Awards announced it would broadcast live on television — reversing earlier plans for a streaming-only show. Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television CEO Tammy Frick previously said going online-only allowed the show to be more 'flexible.' Some top nominees had expressed disappointment in March, telling The Canadian Press that a televised broadcast is key to spotlighting Canadian talent. The Academy said the decision to return to CBC TV came down to NHL scheduling — with no playoff game on Sunday, the two-hour show could air live. This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 1, 2025. Alex Nino Gheciu, The Canadian Press
