Talk:29th Canadian Film Awards

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Film: Awards / Canadian

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Mistake in cinematography award

Until February 14 2021, David Lee, Gary Bourgeois and David Appleby were listed as nominees for Best Cinematography on the film The Silent Partner. But they actually worked on the sound for The Silent Partner, not on cinematography. I removed them without replacement because I could not find independent sources that hadn't been copied from Wikipedia! Plus, four nominees, not five, seems consistent with other categories.

David Lee is mentioned further down as the winner for Best Sound. The other two names don't appear, so I left them out until further sourcing confirms whether they were also award recipients or not. --Sprachraum (talk) 14:40, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

"Four films nominated for Etrogs" by Jay Scott, published in The Globe and Mail on August 24, 1978, lists David Lee, Gary Bourgeois and David Appleby as nominees in the cinematography category — so that's where the issue arose. That said, I'm not going to revert you as it's plainly evident via IMDb and other sources that they were indeed sound mixers rather than cinematographers on that film — their listing as cinematography nominees in that source appears to be an editing error on their part, rather than proof that the Lee, Bourgeois or Appleby were actually cinematographers. (And it doesn't help that said source doesn't list sound nominees at all, which is why the sound categories in this article still list only the winners.) But the fact that a usually authoritative source made that error in the first place explains why it would have been replicated here.

Accordingly, I've also double checked all of the other "cinematography" nominees listed in that source against the actual film credits just to be safe — and while Lente, Champion and Irwin were credited cinematographers on their respective films, Richard Lightstone was also a sound engineer rather than a cinematographer on The Third Walker even though he was also listed as a cinematography nominee in the same Globe and Mail piece, so I've removed him as well. Basically, there appears to have been an error somewhere in their editorial chain of command, that merged a couple of sound nominees with the cinematography category. Bearcat (talk) 18:19, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Bearcat for further researching that – it's a right old mess! Additionally so, since IMDb is also not a 100% reliable source – but in these cases at least the occupation of all these people becomes pretty obvious looking at the rest of their careers. Won't lead us to the correct nominee sourcing though. Ideally that info might come from the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television itself, and they seem to have a searchable archive database – but I'm having no luck getting it to work. Perhaps there is a block for my European IP that you as a Canadian can overcome? Of course they may not carry records reaching back that far, because they were founded in 1979. But maybe someone there would know where to find reliable sources on the pre-academy era of the Canadian Film Awards. All the best from --Sprachraum (talk) 18:53, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

No, unfortunately that archive's more or less dead for everybody — ever since the last time the Academy restructured its website a few years ago, that database has been a perennially useless framework that's still there, but fails to actually work properly for the purposes of actually retrieving any information from it. I've tried so many times (our Gemini articles are also still garbage with a lot of missing categories that I've been struggling to improve as well), but that database is literally just an empty shell.

The old CFA's are actually incredibly difficult to properly source at the best of times; I own a copy of a CFA/Genies history book that lists all the winners, but finding proper documentation of all the nominees has been a royal hassle — this one is literally the only time in the entire CFA era that I've actually been able to find nominees for any category beyond Best Picture, and as we've just seen even the source here made mistakes. I'd try going to the Lightbox to see if they have records in the Film Reference Library, but, y'know, COVID. Bearcat (talk) 21:48, 14 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]