The Canadian Screen Awards is set to become the latest awards show to shift to gender-neutral acting categories.
The Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television has announced the move for lead and supporting performers in film and TV categories, starting with the 2023 national entertainment industry kudosfest. The number of performance categories will swell from five to eight.
The move also brings the film and TV categories in line with the Canadian Screen Awards’ digital categories, which went to gender-neutral performance categories in 2019.
“As the Canadian Academy, we recognize it is our duty to ensure that every performer has the opportunity to fully participate in our awards programs and the industry, in general, and this move brings us closer to that goal,” Louis Calabro, the Academy’s interim CEO, said in a statement.
Canada’s national film and TV awards is following the lead of the Grammys and the MTV Movie & TV Awards in moving to non-gender performance categories for more diversity on-screen, with the Emmys and the Oscars yet to follow suit.
Canadian TV is also embracing more diverse scripted series like Sort Of, the CBC and HBO Max comedy created by Bilal Baig and Fab Filippo and starring Baig as a non-binary millennial who straddles various identities among friends and family in Toronto.