And the Maple Leaf Oscar goes to.... the movie Donald Trump hates.
The Apprentice, a 2024 biopic chronicling Trump’s real estate career in the 1970s and ’80s, won every award for which it was nominated at the Canadian Screen Awards.
The Screen Awards’ love for The Apprentice is the latest in an ongoing series of jabs against the president after Trump repeatedly expressed his desire to make Canada the 51st state. Just last week, King Charles wrapped up a two-day visit to Canada, where he met with newly minted prime minister Mark Carney to publicly reiterate the strength of Canada’s bond with the United Kingdom as part of the Commonwealth.
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Shortly before the King’s visit, Carney met with Trump himself at the White House, where he put in no uncertain terms that Canada had no plans of becoming a the 51st state.
“As you know from real estate, there are some places that are never for sale,” the Canadian prime minister told Trump during the May visit. “Having met with the owners of Canada over the course of the campaign the last several months, it’s not for sale, it won’t be for sale, ever.”
When Carney, who campaigned on anti-Trump messaging, won the election to become Prime Minister in March, a poll showed 85 percent of Canadian voters strongly opposed Trump’s proposal to make Canada an American state.
Though the celebrity cast of The Apprentice was absent from Sunday night’s ceremony, the film’s Canadian producer, Daniel Bekerman, joined Carney and King Charles in publicly rejecting Trump’s pitch to annex his country.
While accepting the prize for Best Film, Bekerman told the audience, “Our movie shows how the young Donald Trump amassed wealth and power by finding a dilapidated building and slapping his name on it as president… Now he wants to slap his name on this country.”
Addressing the audience, Bekerman then told his fellow filmmakers, “We’re faced with power structures that want to silence us. It’s time to lock arms.”
Beyond Bekerman’s fiery speech, the win itself was a major shot at the American president, who was vehemently opposed to The Apprentice’s 2024 release. Trump has publicly bashed the film repeatedly since its premiere at Cannes last May, calling the film “fake,” “classless,” and a “politically disgusting hatchet job” made by “human scum.”
The president even attempted to prevent the film from hitting theaters, sending a cease and desist letter to director Ali Abbassi after Cannes. However, the threatened lawsuit never materialized, and the film was released nationwide in October 2024.
Though a box office failure, it received critical praise for its performances, and merited first-time Oscar nominations for both Stan and Strong.
Trump’s vehement opposition to the film wasn’t surprising: among other gory details, The Apprentice resurfaces allegations that the president raped his first wife, Ivana Trump, and depicts the Justice Department’s 1973 investigation into the Trump family for housing discrimination after allegations they purposefully denied leases to Black families.
The film also delves into Trump’s relationship with Cohn, alleging Cohn, who died in 1986, was responsible for shaping much of the president’s business philosophy.
In October, Roger Stone, a longtime friend of both Trump and Cohn, called the film “uncanny in its accuracy.”
Unlike the president, the Canadian Screen Awards couldn’t get enough of the biopic. In addition to scoring Best Film, The Apprentice also picked up Best Lead Performance for Sebastian Stan as Trump and Best Supporting Performance for Jeremy Strong as Trump’s former mentor, Roy Cohn. Outside of the acting categories, the film also won Best Makeup and Best Hair.
