Star Awards 2017

Star Awards 2017 (also SA2017, Chinese: 红星大奖2017) is a television award ceremony which is held in Singapore. It is part of the annual Star Awards organised by Mediacorp for free-to-air channels Channels 8 and U. The Road to Star Awards 2017 was broadcast live on 26 March, and 2 and 9 April 2017. The theme for this year's Star Award is "影响 (Influence)".

The nominations for the awards were first revealed 23 January 2017, followed by the Top 10 Most Favourite Artistes on a press conference on 3 March 2017 at Marina Square.^[1] 12 programs won at least one award, among which Best Drama Serial Hero, along with The Dream Job and The Gentlemen, as well as variety series As I Hold Your Hand, were tied with the most wins for a ceremony with two.

As part of the "3+1" format introduced exclusively this year, The Road to Star Awards 2017 is a series of three one-hour live-broadcast prelude shows leading up to the main presentation (on 16 April) itself, premiering on 26 March. Each one of the three episodes focuses on one of the award categories with invited artistes, mostly nominees, usually come to discuss the award ceremony and predicted their favorites for the acting categories. The end of each episode also reveal the current standing for the Top 10 Most Favorite Artistes award, and the bottom four artistes (per each category) at the close of the third episode were eliminated from running of the award, a first in Star Awards history.

Winners are listed first, highlighted in boldface.

The theme for Show 1 focuses on drama, and artistes – mainly the performance category nominees, were invited to the preludes and asked to select their favourites for the acting categories. Andie Chen was the artistes' choice for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor, while Zoe Tay and Paige Chua were the picks for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress, respectively.

^1 The nominee was absent from the show.

The theme for Show 2 is variety, focusing on the variety and info-ed awards, as well as awards sponsored by the show's brands, Bioskin and London Choco Roll. During the show, Quan Yi Fong was the artistes' choice for the Best Programme Host. In one segment, the variety hosts also compared awards they have won so far.

^2 The nominee was absent from the show.

In the third and final week of preludes, Kate Pang replaced Pornsak as co-host, since the latter took leave. The All-Time Favourite Artistes, Quan Yi Fong, Elvin Ng and Joanne Peh were interviewed by Dennis Chew with a series of quick-fire question and answer segment; Peh, who pre-recorded her acceptance speech in anticipation of her labour of her second child, provided the funniest answer when asked to share her "favourite body part" of husband Qi Yuwu. South Korean actor So Ji-sub made an appearance at the end of the episode, who was tasked to unlock the briefcase containing the envelopes for the shortlists for the 40 artistes still running for the Top 10 Most Popular Artiste award.

The awards ceremony was held on 16 April 2017 at the MES Theatre @ Mediacorp. The ceremony was hosted by Lee Teng and featured a total of 16 international presenters and performers.

Winners are listed first, highlighted in boldface.

^3 This award is a special achievement award given out to artiste(s) who have achieved a maximum of 10 popularity awards over 10 years. Top 10 winning years all three of recipients were awarded are highlighted in boldface, while years with only one recipient winning are highlighted in italics. The award will not be presented in 2018, as there are no recipients with ten Top 10 Most Popular Male or Female Artistes award wins to allow the award to be presented that year.

This year's Top 10 Most Popular Artistes awards sees the number of nominees expanded by eight – four per gender – to 48, the second time to expand such number since 2011 (which had 21). As usual, viewers voted for their favourite artiste through telepoll and online voting (each weighing 50% of the results). At the end of the preludes, the top 20 artistes for each gender advanced to the main presentation to vie for the Top 10 awards. Voting for the awards opened at noon on 4 March and ended at 8:30 pm on 16 April.

The nominees are listed in telepoll line order. The results of the Top 10 awards are not in any rank order.

Key

The following individuals presented awards or performed musical numbers.

The 2017 show announced that the format will feature a "3+1" format, with broadcast of three prelude episodes focusing mostly on technical awards and discussions prior to the actual ceremony, thus making it the first show since 2009 to have one main ceremony.^[2] While technical awards are presented during the lead-up shows, the backstage awards (Best Set Design, Best Cameraman and Best Editing) and the Rocket Award were neither mentioned nor awarded for unknown reasons. The Best News Story and Best Current Affairs Story were presented for the last time this ceremony, ending a 17-year tradition where News and Current Affairs awards are presented in the awards since its inception in 2000 (the Best News Presenter and Best Current Affairs Presenter had last presented in 2013 and had not presented since then despite Channel 8 News & Current Affairs had more than ten nominations for the categories).

Owing to Jeanette Aw's dominance in viewer-based awards,^[3] voting-based awards had been reworked during the ceremony, whereas online voting are now incorporated along with the Top 10 Most Favourite Artistes, and had its other categories removed until its reappearance in 2022. The Top 10 had also expanded its number of nominations to 24 for the first time since 2011 (with 21 nominations), with intermediate eliminations for the first time ever after the third prelude show ended (however, 2000 was the first time where a nomination, Erica Lee, was removed during the voting period).

With the Infocomm Media Development Authority's revamp of its measurement of viewership, as well as the introduction of infomercials in prime-time programming (as was first seen in The Truth Seekers and Tanglin), both the Top Rated Variety Programme and Top Rated Drama Serial awards were also removed.^[4][5]

• Hero marked only the second time the drama has received more than four nominations for a particular category. The first such occurrence was in 2009 where The Little Nyonya received five for a category; coincidentally, both occurrences were under the Best Supporting Actress category.
• Terence Cao and Cheng Xiao Ying has by far the longest absence by any returning artiste at a gap of 19 and 16 ceremonies, having last nominated in 1998 and 2001, respectively.
• Eight artistes were nominated for the Top 10 for the first time, which were Bonnie Loo, He Yingying, Hong Ling, Seraph Sun, Sora Ma, Andie Chen, Cavin Soh and Desmond Ng.
• Chen Hanwei was tied with Xie Shaoguang on winning the most number of Best Actor wins, with five.
• Star Awards was tied with NKF Charity Show on winning the most number of Best Variety Special wins, with seven.
• The nominations for the Best Drama Serial saw records:
  • You Can Be an Angel Too became the tenth series to receive more than one nomination for the category.
  • C.L.I.F. became the first series to receive a fourth nomination for the category, surpassing The Unbeatables and The Journey's three. C.L.I.F. 4 Best Drama Serial loss to Hero meant it set a record for most nominations for the category without winning Best Drama Serial.

The 2017 ceremony won the Best Variety Producer in the ceremony next year. However, due to the absence of the Best Variety Special category for the first time since 2000, Star Awards ended its 11-show streak of being nominated since the 2006 ceremony.