Genie goes to --: celebrating 50 years of Canadian film awards.

And the Genie Goes To ...: Celebrating 50 Years of the Canadian Film Awards Maria Topalovich, Stoddart Publishing, Toronto. 249 pages. $50.00

This worthy account of the the Canadian Film Awards/Genies is essentially an update of a book that was published in 1984 by the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television. Originally titled A Pictorial History of the Canadian Film Awards, it has been long out of print and it is to the Academy's and its director's, Maria Topalovich, credit that finally a second edition is now available.

So little is written about Canadian film history that anything published is welcome, and as a reference book, And the Genie Goes to ... is invaluable. The Canadian Film Awards (CFAs), latmched in 1949, were erratic at best, and with no feature-film industry to speak of in the 1950s and '60s, a lot of the awards went to television productions and industry shorts, many of which have now disappeared from view. The CFAs were awarded by an "international jury," leading to strange anomalies. In 1970, an animated short, Bretislav Pojar's NFB-produced Psychocratie, won Film of the Year, while Don Shebib's Goin' Down the Road was honoured with Best Feature Film. Then in 1973, in an attempt to reach out to a very vocal group of Quebecois is filmmakers, the awards were held for the first time in Montreal. This actually backfired when the L'Association des Realisateurs et Realisatrices des Films du Quebec boycotted the ceremonies, which were reduced to a press conference. To make matters worse, that year Slipstream won for Best Feature Film over Kamouraska, Paperback Hero, Rejeanne Padovani and Between Friends. Perhaps the most inept film ever to win at the CFAs, its victory did a great deal of damage to the credibility of the international jury system. The following year the awards were cancelled altogether.

The time was ripe for change, hence the creation of the Academy in 1980. Initially, the Genies were voted on by Academy members, much like the US system for the Oscars, but this only led to further embarrassment when, in the first year, such "Americanized" features as The Changeling, Meatballs and Murder By Degree walked away with all the major awards. Later the Academy went back to the jury system and now seems settled into a fairly established routine without too many gaffes. However, in a major upset in 1996, David Cronenberg's brilliant and provocative Crash was awarded Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay but denied Best Picture, which went to the underachieving Lilies. It seems the Academy, like its big brother in Hollywood, occasionally gets it dead wrong.