Jean-Carl Boucher, left, and Claudio Colangelo star in Ricardo Trogi's period film 1981, one of the best-picture nominees at this year's Jutra awards. (Alliance Films Media)

Les Prix Jutra, which honour the memory of filmmaker Claude Jutra, who broke ground with Mon oncle Antoine (1971), were founded to boost the profile of quality Quebec films. But many critics and auteurs believe the Jutras have lost their way. Award-winning director Denis Villeneuve, for example, recently called the annual awards ridiculous.

Award-winning Quebec director Denis Villeneuve recently called the annual Jutra film awards ridiculous.

For most of their history, the Jutras have been voted on by members of various industry associations in their respective professional categories — for example, producers and cinema owners picked the best film and directors chose the best director. Many Quebec creative types maintained that academy members didn’t see the films, and simply voted for their friends or the box-office hits. And in some respects, the criticism was valid. In its early years, the Jutras shut out popular films like Les Boys II (1998) and Elvis Gratton 2 (1999) — but last year, Luc Picard’s hit Babine led the race, and 2008 homegrown box-office star Les 3 p'tits cochons (Three Little Pigs) received a whopping 13 nominations. In 2007, the record-breaking Bon Cop Bad Cop picked up the most Jutra nods.

Bowing to pressure from the industry, the Jutras radically changed their nomination process this year. Now, a jury of 18 people selects the best picture nominations; this cohort is then split in two to decide the contenders in the other categories. The industry still votes in their respective professional categories to pick the winners. Most observers hope the change marks a return to the Jutras’ original goal of promoting auteur films. Yet it’s unclear whether the new system is any improvement.

The one advantage to nomination by jury is that all the eligible films — there were 39 this year — will be screened by judges. Under the old system, a film like De père en flic (Fathers and Guns), which earned $11 million at the Quebec box office last year (just shy of Bon Cop Bad Cop’s record-breaking $12 million) would likely have picked up a raft of nominations. But it’s only been recognized in two categories — best actor (for Michel Côté) and best supporting actor (Rémy Girard).

De père en flic is an action-comedy about a bickering father-and-son cop team who are assigned to infiltrate a group-therapy camp for fathers and sons. Written by Ian Lauzon and director Émile Gaudreault, this clever film deserved nominations in the best direction and best screenplay categories. Yes, it's a cop comedy, but it's an original, distinctly Quebecois one. (Sony has bought the rights for an American version.) That the Jutra jury overlooked De père in favour of Dédé, à travers les brumes, a banal chronicle about the frontman of the 1990s Quebec band Les Colocs, is troubling.

With 10 nominations, Dédé is the lead nominee this year; it picked up nods for best film, script, director (Jean-Philippe Duval) and actor (Sébastien Ricard, from local hip-hop trio Loco Locass). The story of André “Dédé” Fortin's career and tragic death is a compelling one, and the film featured some solid performances, but the direction is uninspired and the screenplay clichéd, at times downright awful. Fortin's music and commitment to nationalism inspired a generation of young Quebecers, who saw his suicide as a devastating blow. Yet the depth and complexity of his personality and the impact of his music on the province’s youth rarely come through in the film. Dédé was nonetheless a popular hit, earning over $1.5 million at the box office.

The Inuit tragedy Before Tomorrow is a welcome surprise among the best-picture nominees. (Alliance Films Media)

The jury’s other picks for best picture include Polytechnique, Denis Villeneuve’s sobering look at the 1989 murder of 14 women at a Montreal engineering school; J'ai tué ma mere (I Killed My Mother), Xavier Dolan’s exceptional story of the emotionally fraught relationship between a single mother and her intense adolescent son; and 1981, Ricardo Trogi’s very standard tale of growing up the son of an Italian immigrant in Quebec City.

The welcome surprise in the best picture category is Le jour avant le lendemain (Before Tomorrow), an acclaimed but largely unknown film set in the 1840s, about an Inuit woman and her grandson, who return from a hunting trip to find their village has been massacred. It is nominated in four categories, including best film and best director for Marie-Hélène Cousineau and Madeline Piujuq Ivalu. This film, in Inuktituk and English, would likely have gone completely unnoticed under the former nomination system.

While Dolan also received nominations for his screenplay and direction, many other auteur works underperformed, including writer-director Bernard Émond's La donation, the last film in his trilogy on the Catholic values of faith, hope and charity. This moving, compassionate film about a troubled city doctor who moves to a declining mining town in northern Quebec only picked up three nominations, for screenplay, actress (Élise Guilbault) and cinematography (Sara Mishara).

The film Lost Song is among the overlooked films at this year's Jutras. (Mongrel Media)

The jury also completely overlooked the work of a group of imaginative young filmmakers who have been making the rounds of the international festival circuit and are sometimes referred to as Quebec's New Wave. Some of the New Wave titles released last year include Demain (by Maxime Giroux), Carcasses (Denis Côté), Derrière moi (Rafaël Ouellet) and Lost Song (by Acadian director Rodrigue Jean). These are rather glaring omissions. Carcasses screened at Cannes and was listed as one of Canada’s top 10 films of 2009; meanwhile, Lost Song picked up the award for Best Canadian Feature Film at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2008.

Why did they get left out? Like Émond, this group is anti-establishment and frequently casts a critical eye on their culture — rarely a crowd-pleasing kind of move. Influenced by filmmakers like Roy Andersson, Darren Aronofsky and Gus Van Sant, these auteurs often focus on the morose, seemingly mundane aspects of daily life, often with painstaking slowness. The themes they explore are undeniably dark: social isolation, the breakdown of the family, teenage suicide, prostitution and post-partum depression.

New Wave films are far from flawless, but they are always challenging. Helmers such as Rodrigue Jean and Denis Côté are Quebec cinema’s biggest risk takers, artists that push the craft forward. It’s unfortunate the new and improved Jutra jury doesn’t recognize them as such.

The 2010 Jutra awards will be held in Montreal on March 28.

Patricia Bailey is a writer and broadcaster based in Montreal.