1. Monsieur Lazhar is to be feared and respected.

Though not quite as dominant as fellow French Canadian faves Incendies and Polytechnique had been at recent ceremonies, the schoolroom drama was still the biggest victor at Thursday night’s Canadian film-awards bash in the Westin Harbour Castle. Director Philippe Falardeau’s fourth feature won six out of nine possible prizes, including best picture. While onstage, Falardeau joked about getting to use the speech he’d been unable to recite at the Oscars, where his film lost to A Separation in the foreign language category. In the press room afterward, he went on to note that the red carpet at the Academy Awards is “a little longer” but that his experience down south was “a good dress rehearsal for tonight.” Indeed, the genial filmmaker seemed at a loss as to what he would do with the “60 pounds of Genies” he had to lug away. Another Lazhar winner—11-year-old Sophie Nélisse, named best supporting actress—was much more confident when asked where she was going to keep her award. “In my room,” explained Nélisse, as if nothing could be more obvious.

2. Viggo has a thing for the Habs.

The evening’s other big winner was A Dangerous Method. Besides earning five prizes, David Cronenberg’s head-shrinker drama also provided the night with its starriest out-of-towner: Viggo Mortensen, who won best supporting actor for his turn as Sigmund Freud. Upon accepting the award, the former Aragorn paid tribute to his favourite hockey team by wrapping the Genie in a Montreal Canadiens flag. (As host George Strombolopolous cracked, it may have been the highlight of the season for the struggling Habs.) Backstage, Mortensen suggested he might’ve found a way to refashion the notoriously odd-looking statuette. He was more reflective on the topic of why Cronenberg’s films never seem to fare as well as they should during awards season. “It’s because they look deceptively simple, like a great painting,” says the actor, who’s now made three films with the director. “He makes something that’s very difficult look really easy. But when you see his movies a second or a third time, you see more rather than less.”

3. The CBC can put figure skaters in anything.

It’s not easy trying to interest Canadian viewers in an awards show full of nominees that may be little seen (or little seen outside of Quebec, where moviegoers give far more support to their own). Nevertheless, incorporating figure-skating routines into the show was a spectacularly cringeworthy idea. The fact that Joannie Rochette, Jamie Salé and David Pelletier—performing to nominated songs by the likes of Malajube and Steven Page—were obscured by a white sheet suggested that someone at the Ceeb suspected the same thing. On the other hand, performances by Johnny Reid and The Sheepdogs may very well have been enhanced by the addition of triple axels.

4. Deserving young filmmakers sometimes walk away with hardware, too.

Though long perceived as an opportunity for industry bigwigs to slap their own backs, the awards show has gotten savvier in recent years, especially when it comes to rewarding young talent. Already honoured at TIFF, Toronto-born and Brooklyn-based director Ian Harnarine scored again with Doubles With Slight Pepper, a short he made with the help of his former NYU prof Spike Lee. A hugely ambitious project that sent filmmakers and musicians into Canada’s wilds, The National Parks Project was acknowledged for Zacharias Kunuk’s contribution. Equally deserving was the first-feature citation for Nuit #1, Anne Émond’s provocative drama about two Montrealers who spend the night baring their souls to each other after a post-party hook-up. Talking to the press, Émond said she was inspired to make the film out of a sense of generational malaise that she felt was common among her peers. Émond admitted that she too found herself nearing the age of 30 and wondering, “Why am I still dancing in a club at 6 a.m.?”

5. But the Canadian movie we most want to see isn’t even done yet.

If the Genies are any indicator of the health of Canada’s film community, then we’re in the midst of a robust time for both the French and English halves of the industry. The imminent arrival of Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis and Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children bodes well for the coming year. And while we’ll have to wait until the next Genies to see if any of these newbies are deemed prize-worthy, it’s still exciting to hear that one of Toronto’s true movie mavericks is almost ready to unveil his latest. An early collaborator of Atom Egoyan and Bruce McDonald, and long one of the city’s best cinematographers, Peter Mettler has made some of the most gorgeous and idiosyncratic Canadian movies of the last two decades, including his hallucinatory docs Vision of Light (1994) and Gambling, Gods and LSD (2002). Mettler’s first film since Petropolis, his eerie aerial study of the Alberta tar sands, is just about done, according to one of its producers, local indie-film stalwart Ingrid Veninger. “It’s called The End of Time and subtitled ‘Everything Begins Now,’” says Veninger, who spent the night tweeting about the show for the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television. “It’s very personal, very lyrical and meditative in the Mettler way. I resist saying it’s a doc, though.” Shot in sites as diverse as Costa Rica, Switzerland and Hawaii and featuring music by Richie Hawtin, it’s bound to be as unclassifiable as his past cinematic quests.