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ACTRA Award
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ACTRA Award
The ACTRA Awards are Canadian accolades presented since 1972 to celebrate excellence in cinema, television and radio industries. Initially it was organized and presented by the Alliance of Canadian Television and Radio Artists, which represented performers, writers and broadcast journalists, and were responsible for awarding the Nellie statuettes until 1986. That year, they were taken over by the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television to create the new Gemini Awards, although ACTRA continued to present Nellies in radio categories.
The organization relaunched the awards in 2003, this time as a more local-focused film industry award, separately presented by each of ACTRA's regional chapters to honour performances in local film and television production, since expanded to incorporate web series and video games.
ACTRA began presenting the John Drainie Award for distinguished lifetime contribution in broadcasting in 1968, before launching a comprehensive program for television and radio awards in 1972. The 1st ACTRA Awards that year only presented the Drainie Award alongside the new Earle Grey Award for actors and Gordon Sinclair Award for broadcast journalism, with its roster of categories beginning to expand the following year.
By 1978, there began to be talk in the industry of a "Nellie curse", as several broadcast personalities in the past couple of years had been fired or had their shows cancelled very soon after winning an ACTRA award. The same year also saw the first widespread complaints about ACTRA's nomination criteria, which limited honours in most categories to ACTRA members; even if ACTRA members had collaborated with non-ACTRA members, then only the ACTRA member could be considered for nomination.
That year further saw the public revelation of an unconfirmed but longstanding industry rumour that if Lloyd Robertson had won the award for Best News Broadcaster at the 4th ACTRA Awards in 1975, elements in the audience were planning to pie him in the face just to see if they could cause the normally unflappable Robertson to lose his composure.
By 1980, the CTV network decided to boycott the awards, on the grounds that the members-only rule biased the awards in favour of CBC Television productions; the issue arose because the CBC produced most of its programming directly, and thus nearly all CBC programming involved ACTRA members, while CTV broadcast far more programming from independent non-ACTRA producers. The boycott, which continued for several years thereafter, sparked discussions through the early 1980s about how to improve the management and delivery of Canadian television awards.
In this era, there was also significant concern about the fact that ACTRA only presented awards in categories such as acting, writing and journalism, but had no categories for television crafts such as cinematography or editing, as well as a controversy when ACTRA rejected the CBC's proposal of Dan Aykroyd as host, on the grounds that he was working in the United States and not an active ACTRA member.
By 1983, the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television's experimental Bijou Awards, which had been presented for the first time in 1981, were being proposed to replace the ACTRA Awards, but this did not proceed at this time; ultimately, responsibility for presenting the Canadian television awards was transferred to the Academy's new Gemini Awards in 1986.
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ACTRA Award
The ACTRA Awards are Canadian accolades presented since 1972 to celebrate excellence in cinema, television and radio industries. Initially it was organized and presented by the Alliance of Canadian Television and Radio Artists, which represented performers, writers and broadcast journalists, and were responsible for awarding the Nellie statuettes until 1986. That year, they were taken over by the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television to create the new Gemini Awards, although ACTRA continued to present Nellies in radio categories.
The organization relaunched the awards in 2003, this time as a more local-focused film industry award, separately presented by each of ACTRA's regional chapters to honour performances in local film and television production, since expanded to incorporate web series and video games.
ACTRA began presenting the John Drainie Award for distinguished lifetime contribution in broadcasting in 1968, before launching a comprehensive program for television and radio awards in 1972. The 1st ACTRA Awards that year only presented the Drainie Award alongside the new Earle Grey Award for actors and Gordon Sinclair Award for broadcast journalism, with its roster of categories beginning to expand the following year.
By 1978, there began to be talk in the industry of a "Nellie curse", as several broadcast personalities in the past couple of years had been fired or had their shows cancelled very soon after winning an ACTRA award. The same year also saw the first widespread complaints about ACTRA's nomination criteria, which limited honours in most categories to ACTRA members; even if ACTRA members had collaborated with non-ACTRA members, then only the ACTRA member could be considered for nomination.
That year further saw the public revelation of an unconfirmed but longstanding industry rumour that if Lloyd Robertson had won the award for Best News Broadcaster at the 4th ACTRA Awards in 1975, elements in the audience were planning to pie him in the face just to see if they could cause the normally unflappable Robertson to lose his composure.
By 1980, the CTV network decided to boycott the awards, on the grounds that the members-only rule biased the awards in favour of CBC Television productions; the issue arose because the CBC produced most of its programming directly, and thus nearly all CBC programming involved ACTRA members, while CTV broadcast far more programming from independent non-ACTRA producers. The boycott, which continued for several years thereafter, sparked discussions through the early 1980s about how to improve the management and delivery of Canadian television awards.
In this era, there was also significant concern about the fact that ACTRA only presented awards in categories such as acting, writing and journalism, but had no categories for television crafts such as cinematography or editing, as well as a controversy when ACTRA rejected the CBC's proposal of Dan Aykroyd as host, on the grounds that he was working in the United States and not an active ACTRA member.
By 1983, the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television's experimental Bijou Awards, which had been presented for the first time in 1981, were being proposed to replace the ACTRA Awards, but this did not proceed at this time; ultimately, responsibility for presenting the Canadian television awards was transferred to the Academy's new Gemini Awards in 1986.