Aah, so THAT's what the new AACTA Awards are about....

Geoffrey Rush, AACTA nominated for The Eye of the Storm

Tonight sees the new local screen awards night take place in Sydney – The Australian Academy of Cinema And Television Arts Awards.

They involve a new organisation, run by the screen industry but still allied to the AFI (Australian Film Institute), and replace what used to be known as the AFI awards.  But are they really new, or merely a much-hyped branding exercise? 

Over at SBS Film website I askedl AFI chief executive Damien Trewhella to explain what it all means. I entered the interview sceptical and ended up feeling convinced it was a timely move that amounted to more than a merely cosmetic exercise. 

I still think the name's daft and suspect in a few years the new Academy will be forced to change it after realising that 99% of the public hears it as the "Actor Awards". (Still, it's an improvement over "the Lovelies", the cringe-inducing name the AFI briefly decided for the awards only a few years ago before quietly dropping it in embarrassment.)

Extract:

LB (asking Trewhella what‘s really new about the move to awards given by a film and TV Academy): It’s not as if the old AFI Awards had been staged without reference to film and television practitioners. Consultation with industry professional bodies over the award rules had been constant – or so the AFI had long been telling us.

Trewhella: “On one hand you’re right, we have been kind of doing that to a point. I’m not saying the awards process was terrible, it probably the best in the country. I used to be questioned internationally all the time – ‘What are the AFI Awards?’ And it would take minutes to explain this thing, and eventually you’d say, ‘It’s the Australian Academy Awards.’ We’re just breaking down all those barriers that were there. 

"The AFI Awards probably made sense back in 1958 when they started but the world has moved on and the benchmarks for the economy, prestige and media space are certainly  ‘Academy Awards’ for film. That is not going to change for at least 100 years, I would imagine.”

But surely, I put it to Trewhella, the international media always referred to the AFI Awards as ‘Australia’s Academy Awards’ anyway - in the same way they call the Goyas ‘Spain’s Academy awards’, ditto the Cesars in France, and so on.

“It is good that some of the media internationally understand it,” he says. “But if you’re a Hollywood executive or at Working Title in the UK whatever, you might not have that granular understanding of all the countries in the world because there’s so many now with production industries. 

"My experience and that of so many practitioners and performers you talk to is (that) you arrive in LA or London with an AFI Award and you’ve got to go through the process of explaining what it is. In America there’s an AFI already, which creates further confusion. So there’s a whole level of development there purely around being able to be understood and recognised..." More at SBS Film online.

Meanwhile on ABC Radio National’s Drive program I took part in a panel discussion last night on that hardy perennial, "the state of the industry", timed to coincide with the awards. My fellow panelists were federal funder Screen Australia's acting CEO, Fiona Cameron, and chief executive of the screen producers’ association, Geoff Brown, and the host was Waleed Ali. You can livestream or download the 20-odd minute discussion here.

My core argument: the local screen sector has given cause for cheer over the past two or three years with successes at both the aesthetic and commercial level and a broader spread of filmmaking than previously. Only this weekend we've had news that Stephan Elliott’s A Few Best Men has earned the best opening figures for a local comedy in more than a decade – better even than the equivalent period for 2011 hit Red Dog. 

Maia Thomas in Black & White & Sex

I could also have mentioned that, at the other end of the scale, John Winter’s low budget drama Black & White & Sex (due for local release in March) has just been voted the third favourite in the Rotterdam film festival’s audience poll (number one was Scorsese’s Hugo). 

Naturally the relationship between box office and artistic success is complex and therefore best tackled on a separate occasion. Nonetheless filmmakers of all types - commercial, genre-oriented, aesthetically rarified - need to connect with audiences, even if those audiences are small and specialised.