AACTA Awards adds new TV categories

The AACTA Awards is adding three new television categories: Best Factual Entertainment, Best Sports Entertainment and Best Sports Coverage.

AFI | AACTA CEO Damian Trewhella said, “The past 20 years have seen a shift in the Australian television landscape, with factual entertainment programs such as Gogglebox and Married at First Sight, alongside sports broadcasting, regularly creating major spikes in television viewing patterns.

“We are proud to introduce these awards to recognise the talent, skill and creativity of the practitioners working in these important sectors. In addition to our recently announced Short Documentary category and reduced entry fees for low-budget productions, these new awards continue AACTA’s mission to be inclusive of all the diverse areas critical to our screen industry and culture.”

The AACTA Award for Best Factual Entertainment will recognise non-fiction programs that are squarely aimed at entertainment, inspiring ongoing cultural conversations, and inciting passionate audience engagement. The Best Factual Entertainment category is open to programs that explore the real world, and the real people within it, in a captivating and entertaining way.

The AACTA Award for Best Sports Entertainment will recognise the best of the wealth of sports discussion and analysis programs on our screens, while the AACTA Award for Best Sports Coverage will acknowledge excellence in the craft of broadcasting live sport and the people who bring these large scale events to our screens. Developed in partnership with Foxtel, these two new categories replace the AACTA Subscription Television Award for Best Sports Presentation (introduced in 2018) and will include coverage and programs on free-to-air and subscription networks.

The AACTA Awards for Best Reality Program and Best Lifestyle Program remain unchanged.

Reality Program means a substantially non-scripted program which involves participants being placed in an environment or format in which the premise, circumstances or situations they encounter are structured and manipulated in an ongoing manner for the purposes of creating the program, and can contain an element of competition and prizes.

Lifestyle Program means a program that relates to contemporary recreational and domestic pursuits such as food and wine, home and garden, real estate and home improvements, health and wellbeing, travel and leisure, beauty and shopping.

Entries across all Television categories open at 9am Tuesday 28 May 2019

TV Tonight is a partner of the AACTA Awards.