The 8th Annual Genie Awards were held on March 18, 1987, to honour Canadian films made the previous year. The show was again held at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre and was co-hosted by actors Helen Shaver, Linda Sorensen and Jean LeClerc. It was broadcast live on CBC Television. The prestigious Air Canada Award was presented to Garth Drabinsky, film producer and head of North America's largest movie exhibition chain, Cineplex Odeon. The Special Achievement award went to Taming of the Demons, a film commissioned by Teleglobe Canada for Expo 86 by experimental filmmaker Emil Radok which explores the development of civilization through communications technologies. The show itself received mixed reviews but the Canadian film industry had finally received the break it had long been waiting for in Denys Arcand's The Decline of the American Empire (Le Déclin de l'empire américain), an international hit which, a few months earlier, had won the International Critics' Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and become the first Canadian film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film. To no one's surprise, it dominated the awards.

Winners and nominees