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Critics Choice expands into territory it has never claimed before, and the timing tells you a lot about where entertainment actually lives now.
The Critics Choice Association is launching the inaugural Critics Choice Creator Awards, an event set aside entirely for work made outside the film and television pipeline. Podcasts, online series, documentaries, lifestyle programming and sports content are all in play, along with plenty of formats that did not have a name a decade ago.
For an organization built on more than 500 critics and entertainment journalists, this is less a pivot than an acknowledgment of something that already happened while the industry was looking elsewhere.
Digital entertainment gets its own Critics Choice honors
Waiting for a theatrical window or a network premiere stopped being how most people find things a while ago.
A fair number of today’s most recognizable performers, hosts and personalities came up through YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, podcast feeds and independent streamers, and the ones with real followings got there without a studio signing off on anything. Something posted on a Tuesday can be the thing everybody is arguing about by Friday.
That is the world these categories were designed for.
The announced slate so far runs to Creator of the Year, Podcast Host, Audio Podcast, Video Podcast, Comedy Creator and Drama Creator. Beyond that, the awards will make room for comedy series, micro-drama series, business programming, health and wellness creators and relationship-focused content, with documentary and informational shows, lifestyle content, game shows and sports series expected as well.
A complete category list, plus the submission requirements, is due closer to the event.
Creators get a full year of eligibility
To qualify, a project needs to have been publicly available online to its intended audience at some point between January 1 and December 31 of 2026.
It is a generous window, and deliberately so. A one-off special counts. So does a finished series, a podcast that ran all year, or a steady stream of digital video that never had a premiere date to speak of.
Submissions open October 19 and close February 1, 2027. Nominations land March 18, and the first group of winners will be revealed April 15.
Critics Choice expands beyond film and television
There is a simple logic underneath all of this, which is that critics tend to follow the audience whether or not they meant to.
Still, it is a genuine departure for a group whose awards have lived almost exclusively in movies and scripted television. Digital creators, podcasters and independently financed online series are pulling from the same finite pool of attention as anything playing in theaters, and pretending otherwise stopped being tenable some time ago.
What the Creator Awards provide is a separate mechanism for that work, sized to the range of formats it actually covers.
The category structure is the interesting part. Instead of shoving everything made for the internet into one undifferentiated bucket, Critics Choice expands the framework far enough to treat an audio podcast, a video show, a micro-drama and a sports series as fundamentally different crafts, judged accordingly.
Submissions for the inaugural Creator Awards run October 19 through February 1, 2027, with nominations announced March 18 and winners revealed April 15.
Disclosure: The author is a member of the Critics Choice Association.
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