Daniel J. Gordon, as Ciel, in a scene from Nurse.Fighter.Boy, one of the best-picture nominees for this year's Genie Awards. (Anna Keenan/Mongrel Media)

Painting a maple leaf on your face may count as appropriate preparation for an Olympic hockey game, but it seems unlikely that any moviegoer has ever done so before going to watch a Canadian film. If such a diehard truly exists, he or she would have a hell of a time actually seeing the nominees for best picture at this year’s Genie awards.

It’s common for Canadians to complain about not having heard of Genie-nominated movies, but this year’s list of contenders is particularly confounding.

Up for best film this year are Polytechnique, Nurse.Fighter.Boy, 50 Dead Men Walking, Before Tomorrow and 3 Saisons. While it’s commonplace for otherwise culturally literate Canadians to complain about not having heard of Genie-nominated movies, this year’s list is particularly confounding. It makes you wonder about the purpose and objective of the country’s annual film awards, which take place in Toronto on April 12.

One issue is our general inability to see these movies in theatres, a perennial problem in a country where domestic productions represented 2.9 per cent of the total box office haul in 2008 — with French-language hits being responsible for most of that percentage. Only the most dedicated and well-travelled patriots could have seen this year’s Genie contenders. The most heavily favoured film — Polytechnique, Denis Villeneuve’s complex, nuanced rendering of the 1989 Montreal Massacre — was one of very few Quebecois efforts to get a national theatrical release. (It helped that Villeneuve simultaneously made English- and French-language versions.)

Contrast its situation with that of a much more popular film, De Père en flic. With a take of $10.5 million, the father-and-son cop comedy was Canada’s top-grossing homegrown production last year. Yet it went straight to video in English Canada. Other Quebec-made movies with multiple Genie noms — like Jim Donovan’s raw indie drama 3 Saisons; Ricardo Trogi’s wry childhood memoir 1981; and Grande Ourse: La clé des possibles, a spinoff from a popular Quebecois kids’ series — were screened only at festivals or film societies outside the province.

Then again, it wasn’t much easier for Anglos to see movies made in English: 50 Dead Men Walking, Kari Skogland’s dramatic thriller about an IRA informant, lasted only a few weeks in theatres in our biggest cities. Nurse.Fighter.Boy, a modest but well-wrought drama created under the auspices of the Canadian Film Centre’s Feature Film Project, received small runs in five theatres in Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa and Saskatoon.

Both Before Tomorrow and Nurse.Fighter.Boy premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2008 — which means they’ve been in circulation for a good 18 months. Canadian distributors do not approach the Genies the way that Hollywood studios do the Oscars, which occur when many of the highest-profile entries are just beginning their theatrical runs. All five of this year’s Genie best picture nominees have long been available on DVD and video-on-demand services, so the promotional value of winning the big prize is obviously more limited.

To be fair to the voters, the pool of eligible films had a shortage of universally admired entries. (A shortlist of those special titles in recent years would include Deepa Mehta’s Water, Jean-Marc Vallée’s C.R.A.Z.Y. and Sarah Polley’s Away From Her.) Nor was there a major new work by one of our heavyweight auteurs, like David Cronenberg or Denys Arcand. (The mixed reception for Atom Egoyan’s Adoration was reflected in a small number of Genie nominations.)

Harder to forgive is the under-representation of many films that were widely admired. Xavier Dolan’s J’ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother), a breakout hit at Cannes and Canada’s official submission for foreign film at the Oscars, merited the Claude Jutra Award for first-time directors, but has no other nominations. The best Canadian feature winner at TIFF in 2009, Ruba Nadda’s Cairo Time, only got a Genie nom for its costume design.

Like Cairo Time, Pontypool was one of a handful of Canadian films to earn something more coveted than any domestic prize: distribution in the U.S. Bruce McDonald’s ingenious zombie thriller fared better than Nadda’s finely rendered romance in the Genie nominations, but was similarly excluded from the best picture category.

One might presume this all comes down to an art-vs.-commerce divide, but those top spots were not reserved for more populist fare, either. Last year’s two most successful English-Canadian films — the second Trailer Park Boys big-screen spinoff and the Joshua Jackson road movie One Week — count only two nominations between them.

Caroline Neron is one of the stars of Jim Donovan's Genie-nominated film 3 Saisons. (Chris Kralik)

As a critic and as a programmer for the Kingston Canadian Film Festival, I can say there’s plenty to celebrate about our cinematic output over the past year. The animated short category is particularly strong, with outstanding efforts by Cordell Baker, Chris Landreth and Bruce Alcock. Current successes like Lixin Fan’s documentary Last Train Home and recent festival faves such as Sophie Deraspe’s drama Les Signes viteaux — which won the top prize at the Whistler Film Festival before traveling to fests in Rotterdam and Austin, Texas — also ensure a measure of optimism for the future. What’s more, they make it easier to sustain the perennial belief that the good stuff will eventually get recognized, even if notice abroad remains the surest way to get some at home.

For all the hand-wringing we do, the struggles of our film industry are not so different from what our equivalents face in Australia, South Korea, Germany and every other nation whose movie markets are flooded with Hollywood product. These countries have their own national film ceremonies, where people in formalwear rise from their seats and walk up to podiums to accept awards on behalf of movies that go virtually unseen by the taxpayers who funded them.

The underlying hope, of course, is that the self-generated hubbub may compel otherwise disinterested viewers to wonder whether these film works merit the fuss. And despite the inconsistencies and inefficiencies that are part of any award-giving apparatus, a good many of these movies deserve it.

The 2010 Genie Awards will take place in Toronto on April 12. The ceremony will be streamed on CBC.ca at 9 p.m. that night.

Jason Anderson is a writer based in Toronto.