Fall Film Festivals Struggle to Regain Their Mojo as Awards Season Launching Pads

It’s late August. Do you know where (and what) your Oscar contenders are?

In the past, I would have answered that question by saying, “No, but in about three weeks I will.” That’s because the end of August brings the beginning of the three fall film festivals that for decades have been the most fruitful ground for premiering Academy Award winners and nominees.

For 14 years between 2007 and 2020, from “No Country for Old Men” to “Nomadland,” the Oscar Best Picture winner screened (and in all but three cases premiered) at the Venice International Film Festival, the Telluride Film Festival or the Toronto International Film Festival, and in many cases in more than one of those festivals. And for most of that time, the majority of Best Picture nominees came out of the Venice-Telluride-Toronto axis.

But then things changed. The 2021 winner, for the first time ever, was a Sundance movie, “CODA.” The following year, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” premiered at SXSW on its way to Oscar glory. And last year, “Oppenheimer” went straight to theaters without any film-festival launching pad.

In fact, over the last three years, fewer than half the Best Picture nominees have come through the fall showcases, with Venice topping those fests with six nominees, the same as May’s Cannes Film Festival. Telluride supplied the premieres of four movies that received nominations while Toronto brought three – and no single festival topped the seven nominees that didn’t have any festival premieres.

The festivals have a chance to reclaim their awards-season primacy beginning this week, with Venice kicking off on Wednesday with the world premiere of “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice,” Telluride following on Friday with three days of yet-unannounced contenders and Toronto beginning Thursday, Sept. 5 with David Gordon Green’s “Nutcrackers.”

They’ll come into a field that isn’t exactly bursting with Best Picture contenders. Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part 2,” the sequel to the 2021 film that was nominated for 10 Oscars and won six, is the closest thing to a likely nominee, though Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man,” Jeff Nichols’ “The Bikeriders” and Greg Kwedar’s “Sing Sing” are more than worthy of  awards attention. And the Cannes Film Festival brought a few more real contenders, including Sean Baker’s “Anora,” Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Perez” and some longer shots like Mohammad Rasoulof’s “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” and Ali Abbasi’s Donald Trump origin story “The Apprentice.”    

But while six of last year’s 10 best-pic nominees had already been seen by the public or by festival audiences at this time last year, it seems unlikely that that many will do so this year. And that leaves the awards race open to these festival offerings.

Venice

The oldest of the fall festivals had little overlap with the Oscars for most of its existence: Between 1949 and 2016, the only winners of Venice’s Golden Lion award that went on to receive Oscar Best Picture nominations were 1980’s “Atlantic City” and 2005’s “Brokeback Mountain.” But over the last seven years, five of the Golden Lion winners have also been Oscar nominees, and two of them – “The Shape of Water” in 2017 and “Nomadland” in 2020 – were Best Picture winners.

This year, Venice is surprisingly long on mainstream movies: Tim Burton’s sequel “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is opening the festival, Todd Phillips’ musical sequel “Joker: Folie a Deux” is one of the most anticipated titles (and the followup to a Golden Lion winner that was embraced by the Academy) and Jon Watts’ “Wolfs” will bring the formidable team of George Clooney and Brad Pitt to the Lido.

Venice films that could be bigger with critics and voters than with multiplex audiences include Pedro Almodovar’s first English-language drama, “The Room Next Door” with Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton; Pablo Larrain’s “Maria,” with Angelina Jolie as opera diva Maria Callas; Dutch director Halina Reijn’s erotic thriller “Babygirl,” with Nicole Kidman; and Luca Guadagnino’s William S. Burroughs adaptation “Queer,” starring Daniel Craig. Australian director Justin Kurzel and American indie stalwart Brady Corbet have to be fully embraced by U.S. awards voters, but both will be in Venice with dramas based on real events: Kurzel’s “The Order” features Jude Law, Nicholas Hoult and Tye Sheridan in the story of a Neo-Nazi group in the early 1980s, while Corbet’s “The Brutalist” stars Adrien Brody as Jewish architect and Holocaust survivor László Tóth.  

Telluride

The Telluride Film Festival doesn’t announce its lineup until the day before it begins, upholding its longstanding tradition of asking audiences to trust the festival’s taste by heading to the Colorado mountain town without knowing what they’re going to see. But it’s no secret what many of the biggest titles in Telluride will be: If a movie isn’t playing in Venice and its Toronto Film Festival billing calls it an International Premiere or Canadian premiere, it’s often headed for the shortest and most low-key of the three festivals.

This year, that means the marquee premieres in Telluride, and the films that will likely warrant attention from awards bodies, include “Conclave,” a drama about intrigue during the selection of a new pope that stars Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow and Isabella Rossellini and comes from German director Edward Berger, whose last film, “All Quiet on the Western Front,” received nine nominations and won four Oscars in 2023.  

“The Piano Lesson” will also come to Telluride with considerable pedigree: It’s another adaptation of a play by August Wilson coming on the heels of “Fences” and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” and it stars Samuel L. Jackson and John David Washington, the latter of whom is working with his brother Malcolm, who directed, and his father Denzel, who produced.

And Telluride regular Jason Reitman will debut his film “Saturday Night,” which details the creation of the first episode of “Saturday Night Live” just in time for that iconic show’s 50th season. Gabriel LaBelle, who last hit the festival circuit with Steven Spielberg’s “The Fabelmans,” plays “SNL” producer Lorne Michaels as part of a large ensemble cast in which lesser-known actors portray the Not-Ready-for-Prime-Time Players and Nicholas Braun, Willem Dafoe and J.K. Simmons pop up in smaller roles.

Also likely in Telluride: RaMell Ross’s Colson Whitehead adaptation “Nickel Boys”; “The Act of Killing” director Joshua Oppenheimer’s narrative debut, “The End,” with Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon; and David Siegel and Scott McGehee’s “The Friend,” starring Naomi Watts as a writer who inherits a very large dog after the death of a friend and mentor.

Toronto

By far the largest of the three festivals, with significantly more films than Venice and Telluride put together, the Toronto International Film Festival will screen many of the films that previously went to the other two festivals. But especially during its first four days, it’ll have a variety of films that could make noise during awards season.

TIFF hasn’t had an opening-night film land a Best Picture nomination since “The Big Chill” in 1983, a streak that David Gordon Green will try to end this year with “Nutcrackers,” a comedy starring and produced by Ben Stiller. Other notable films premiering in Toronto include Edward Burns’ “Millers in Marriage,” starring Gretchen Mol and Julianna Margulies; “We Live in Time,” a romance starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield and directed by John Crowley (“Brooklyn’”); Marielle Heller’s “Nightbitch,” with Amy Adams, about a woman whose domestic life slips into surrealism; Ron Howard’s “Eden,” a survival thriller starring Jude Law, Vanessa Kirby, Daniel Bruhl and Sydney Sweeney; and “Hard Truths,” a drama from acclaimed British director Mike Leigh that stars Marianne-Jean Baptiste, who also played the lead role in Leigh’s 1996 Best Picture nominee “Secrets & Lies.”

Other TIFF titles include “The Return,” Uberto Pasolini’s adaptation of Homer’s “The Odyssey” starring Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche; “Without Blood,” a war film directed by Angelina Jolie and starring Salma Hayek Pinault and Demian Bichir; and “William Tell,” a large-scale adaptation of the story of the Swiss folk hero starring Claes Bang and directed by Nick Hamm.

Those lists just scratch the surface – and if history is any guide, by mid September most of those films will have been written off as true awards contenders while a handful will enter the conversation. The New York Film Festival will show its own slate in late September into October, though its world premieres will be scarce. And then the final batch of possible contenders will drop as voting windows open; those will include Steve McQueen’s World War II movie “Blitz” (premiering at the London Film Festival on Oct. 9), James Mangold’s Bob Dylan story “A Complete Unknown” and Ridley Scott’s  “Gladiator II,” the sequel to his 2000 Best Picture winner.

By the time the dust clears and the ballots are counted, some of the fall festivals may have beefed up their reputations as awards-season launching pads, while others may find that they still haven’t regained their mojo. In truth, the success of a film festival doesn’t depend on how many of its movies are embraced by awards voters. Venice, Telluride and Toronto could be great experiences for filmmakers and audiences even if Oscar voters ignore all their movies six months from now.

But let’s face it: The festivals want those bragging rights.

So here we go.