Canadian Screen Awards: 'Anne With an E,' 'Schitt's Creek' Lead Nominations

Quebec films, led by Daniel Roby's 'Just a Breath Away' and Maxime Giroux's 'The Great Darkened Day,' nabbed the most nominations in film categories.

Netflix's Anne With an E, the adaptation of Anne of Green Gables, and the CBC comedy Schitt's Creek grabbed a field-leading 15 nominations each for the 2019 Canadian Screen Awards on Thursday.

The Billy Campbell and Karine Vanasse-starring Cardinal, a Hulu murder mystery drama that also airs on CTV, grabbed 14 nominations in the TV competition, followed by perennial nominee CBC News: The National scooping 13 in all.

Anne With an E, which is produced out of Canada as a co-production with the CBC, will compete for best TV drama against History's Vikings from showrunner and creator Michael Hirst; the Kim Coates' starrer Bad Blood; CBC's Frankie Drake Mysteries; and OMNI's Blood and Water.

Anne With an E hails from Emmy-winning writer Moira Walley-Beckett (Breaking Bad) and is based on the famed book by Lucy Maud Montgomery. The Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara comedy Schitt's Creek, about a wealthy family that suddenly goes broke, also streams on Netflix.

Other multiple nominees in the TV categories are Lifetime's Mary Kills People; the CBC comedy Workin' Moms; CBC's Equus: Story of the Horse; Wynonna Earp, which airs on Syfy and Space in Canada; and the CraveTV streaming comedy Letterkenny.

On the film side, Canada's national media awards are dominated by Quebec films, as Daniel Roby's apocalyptic Paris-set thriller Just a Breath Away (Dans la brume), which stars Romain Duris and Olga Kurylenko, and Maxime Giroux's The Great Darkened Days (La Grande Noirceur) each nabbed eight nominations.

Close behind with seven nods is the coming-of-age drama A Colony (Une Colonie) from director Genevieve Dulude-De Celles. Kim Nguyen's The Hummingbird Project, which stars Jesse Eisenberg, Alexander Skarsgard, Salma Hayek, and Robert Budreau's Stockholm, a heist thriller starring Ethan Hawke and Noomi Rapace, each scooped up six nominations.

The Canadian Screen Awards, produced by the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television, will hand out its high-profile trophies on March 31 in Toronto during a gala to air on the CBC network.