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There’s been a longtime dominance of fall festivals in the Oscar race, the majority of contenders premiering at Venice, Telluride and Toronto, leaving little room for other routes to victory. For a 13-year period, between 2007 and 2020, there were only two best picture winners that hadn’t travelled that way, and that pair had both premiered at a festival anyway, just slightly earlier at Cannes.
But since the pandemic shifted how so much of the industry operates, the past few years have seen unusual variation. Coda became the first best picture winner from Sundance, Everything Everywhere All at Once the first from SXSW, Oppenheimer the first non-festival premiere to win since The Departed in 2006 and the past six years has seen Cannes with more best picture wins than any other festival. It’s meant that at this particular time of year, as we sift through the good and bad of the fall festivals, it’s harder than ever to predict the race.
At the start of the year, Sundance was light on awards buzz, at least within the narrative space. Jennifer Lopez tried to sing and dance her way to her first Oscar nomination in Bill Condon’s Kiss of the Spider Woman but it feels like a Golden Globe nod might be more realistic, the film getting a mixed reception on the ground. Rose Byrne has a better chance, spiralling down a less conventional route in the bruising dark comedy If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, but the film might be too (deliberately) uncomfortable for voters. The most likely pick seemed to be the period drama Train Dreams, starring a potential best actor nominee in Joel Edgerton and Oscar nominees Felicity Jones and Kerry Condon, after it sold to Netflix for a reported deal of about $10m. The streamer then held the film for the fall festival circuit where it has maintained its slow and steady buzz.
The year’s biggest Oscar sure thing to date then went the Oppenheimer route in April, a commercially minded studio release from a proven auteur released straight to a wide release, festivals be damned. While anticipation might have been high for Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, his first original movie since Fruitvale Station, no one could have predicted just what an all-consuming pop culture phenomenon it would become. While a vampire horror might not seem like something the Academy would normally hunger for, Sinners proved to be, and be about, multiple things at once, and what might have seemed like a dead cert for just craft noms then became a lock for above-the-line too. Warners will probably restart the campaign soonish, recruiting the cast for in-person events, and with easy access for voters (it’s already on HBO Max), it’s hard not to see this one leading the race.
It was then time for Cannes which has become more of an Oscars power player in recent years with premieres including The Substance, Killers of the Flower Moon, Anatomy of a Fall, Parasite, The Zone of Interest, Flow, Emilia Pérez and this year’s best picture winner, Anora. It obviously remains to be seen how this year pans out awards-wise but it seemed to be a slightly more muted edition. Films from Spike Lee, Wes Anderson and Ari Aster were revealed to be either not suitable or not good enough for awards attention while Oscar-nominated actors like Paul Mescal and June Squibb and Oscar-winning actors like Jodie Foster saw their films swiftly removed from contention.
The biggest win would be for Neon once again, coming off the back of an Anora victory, premiering Sentimental Value to almost universal acclaim (it stands at 95% on Rotten Tomatoes). It’s the new film from Joachim Trier, who scored two Oscar nominations for The Worst Person in the World, reuniting with that film’s star Renate Reinsve and recruiting Stellan Skarsgård and Elle Fanning. It’s a film about film-making which the Academy loves and features a mixture of both Norwegian and English, like the similarly multi-language breakout Anatomy of a Fall, which should appeal to the new more globally minded voters. A never-better Skarsgård is already being tipped as a winner.
Elsewhere, Jennifer Lawrence scored strong notices for her role as a mother losing her mind in Lynne Ramsay’s Die, My Love but, like If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, the film might be too challenging/offputting for some more conventionally minded, more male voters. It would still be silly to underestimate Lawrence’s sway with voters (she has one Oscar and three nominations) and with Mubi behind it, the same company that landed Demi Moore a nod for The Substance, as well as a reported post-fest recut of the film, it could be a nomination contender. The Palme d’Or winner, Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident, was picked up by Neon who will also be angling for it to be another non-English language breakthrough. While the film is definitely not being picked as Iran’s submission for the international feature film category (as predictably confirmed this week), France has decided to adopt it instead and recent years have shown it could break into the best picture (and best director) race as well. Brazil did choose The Secret Agent as its submission and the critical reaction suggests it could also factor elsewhere (star Wagner Moura also won best actor at the festival, pushing him into that race). Richard Linklater also premiered the 60s-set Nouvelle Vague, his second film of the year (after Blue Moon at Berlin) which was warmly, if not rapturously, received and with its subject matter (film-making) and buyer (Netflix), could factor in the race.
The summer was without a Barbie- or Oppenheimer-style breakout but it did give us Zach Cregger’s Weapons, an adored smash hit horror film that is unlikely to feature much in awards season but fan campaigns to get its secret weapon Amy Madigan a best supporting actress nomination have the potential to go from digital to real life. She’s a beloved character actor, last nominated in 1986, who is taking a big swing and, with Warners money behind her, it could happen.
Shortly after, we then found ourselves in Venice, another festival that wasn’t without highlights but one which failed to add as much heat to the race as it once did. Noah Baumbach, who premiered Marriage Story to cheers and White Noise to jeers there in years prior, unveiled his much-anticipated latest, the Hollywood comedy Jay Kelly. While some were kinder than others, it didn’t connect in the way that Netflix surely expected with some, including the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, counting it among the writer-director’s worst. It was pegged as a big George Clooney comeback but the one thing all critics seemed to agree on was Adam Sandler, who might finally get his first Oscar nomination in the supporting category. The film might still be in the race despite some middling reviews – sentimentality is something embraced by the Academy along with films about films – but Clooney may struggle in a fiercely competitive best actor race.
That category saw a major contender arrive in Venice in the unusual shape of Dwayne Johnson, whose performance in the MMA drama The Smashing Machine ticked off a number of old-fashioned Oscar-friendly boxes albeit in an unconventional riff. The star has an appealing, ratings-friendly off-screen narrative in a fact-based sports drama but it’s also one directed by one of the Safdie brothers and has the A24 seal, a combination that should help secure old and young voters. His co-star, the Oppenheimer nominee Emily Blunt, might also secure her second nomination but many have complained that her role is too slight. It might be hard to pick an actor from Kathryn Bigelow’s nuclear war thriller A House of Dynamite (it’s an ensemble piece with stars including Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson) but it was one of the festival’s biggest hits and while it could seem too genre-first for Oscars (Variety’s Owen Gleiberman called it “a self-consciously jittery high-end cautionary potboiler”), the director’s history with voters should help make space.
Another former winner, Julia Roberts, couldn’t make much of an impact with critics in Luca Guadagnino’s #MeToo thriller After the Hunt, a film that sputtered out fast, giving the director his worst-reviewed project to date. A fellow best actress winner, Emma Stone, also appeared in Bugonia, reuniting her with Yorgos Lanthimos, but the oddball dark comedy was closer to his less Oscar-friendly work so an across-the-board Poor Things showing is unlikely (although don’t count out Stone as a best actress nominee). Elsewhere, Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein had a mixture of raves and shrugs and might just end up as a below-the-line contender, The Testament of Ann Lee reuniting The Brutalist duo Mona Fastvold and Brady Corbet might be too strange to connect (and it remains without a distributor) and Park Chan-wook’s darkly comedic thriller No Other Choice was a universal hit and could be an international feature player. The festival’s major award, the Golden Lion, was given to Jim Jarmusch’s family comedy Father Mother Sister Brother but despite the presence of previous Oscar nominees and winners such as Cate Blanchett, Adam Driver and Charlotte Rampling, it feels more like an Independent Spirit/Critics Circle play than one for Oscars.
So without a ton of sure things from Venice, everyone then travelled to Colorado for Telluride, in the search of something more substantial. It didn’t take long, with the world premiere of Hamnet, Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of the Maggie O’Farrell novel starring Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley as William and Agnes Shakespeare. Reviews were strong with some quibbles about the pace/self-conscious prestige of it but almost everyone agreed on two things – the finale will make you cry and Buckley is going to win the best actress Oscar. There were more quibbles with the music biopic Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere but again a consensus over Jeremy Allen White belonging in the best actor category with Jeremy Strong potentially in supporting for the second year running. Critics were mostly unimpressed with Ballad of a Small Player, a gambling drama from the Conclave director Edward Berger, and in a weaker year for best actor, star Colin Farrell might have squeaked through but it’s stronger than it’s been in a while and bad buzz followed the film to Toronto.
Which brings us to Canada for the biggest and most commercially focused festival of the season, somewhere that’s become less heavy on premiering Oscar contenders and more important for those needing to maintain buzz. There’s reason to think that The Lost Bus, which received its world premiere on the first weekend, could find its way in, though. It’s from the Oscar-nominated director Paul Greengrass, stars Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey and Oscar nominee America Ferrara and is produced and ushered to the screen by Oscar winner Jamie Lee Curtis. It’s about the devastating Camp fire of 2018 and its grim relevance after this year should make it an easy, emotionally charged vote for many LA voters. Its grimness might also be a problem for others, the film prioritising visceral horror over heart. There was an uneven mixture of both in the boxing biopic Christy which also doubled as a gory domestic violence drama. The film might be a little too generic to factor elsewhere but star Sydney Sweeney impressed enough critics to announce herself as part of the race. Oscar winner Brendan Fraser could make his way into the best actor race with his gentle drama Rental Family winning over enough people on the ground. It’s likely that Roofman, which stars Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst, might be more of an audience than awards play while the warm reception for Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery will probably just lead to an even bigger hit for Netflix than Glass Onion (but with the first film scoring a nod in this category, original screenplay recognition isn’t out of the question). The festival ended with a telling victory for Hamnet, winning the people’s choice award, a prize that has almost always leads to Oscar success.
So what next? Well we’re just over a week away from this year’s New York film festival which opens with After the Hunt, a film in desperate need of a boost, and will see replays of many other films including A House of Dynamite and Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. But all eyes will be on the festival’s two big world premieres. First up is Anemone, a drama that will see the return of Daniel Day-Lewis, on screen for the first time since Phantom Thread in 2017. The film is directed by his son and co-written by the actor himself and if nothing else, it’ll be hard to see him not factoring in the best actor race. It’s also hard to imagine Bradley Cooper’s new film Is This Thing On? not making its mark. Even though it’s a less obvious Oscar movie – a shaggy-looking comedy about a man finding himself as a standup after a divorce – Cooper is beloved by the Academy, his first two films as director amassing 14 nominations and one win.
With the field a little on the light side, the post-festival landscape looks to be more important than ever. The most obvious picks are both sequels to films the Academy has already shown love for: Wicked: For Good and Avatar: Fire and Ash. The former might struggle a bit coming out so soon after the first (the press cycle has been noticeably delayed to avoid media exhaustion) and the latter is hampered by a worryingly ho-hum trailer but both should still factor in many races. At the same time as the New York film festival, Paul Thomas Anderson is choosing to go straight to cinemagoer with his latest, One Battle After Another (he did the same for Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza). Wildly enthused reviews suggest that this strategy will work out once again (those two films had a total of nine noms) and it may well be the one to beat with a timely message and a sure-to-be-nominated Leonardo DiCaprio (Sean Penn and Teyana Taylor also both supporting possibilities). After 11 nominations, might this finally be the film to get Anderson his first Oscar?
There’s also set to be a late burst for Marty Supreme, another Timothée Chalamet-led biopic getting a last-minute release after A Complete Unknown last year (and the second Safdie brother-directed A24 sports drama this year). It worked wonders before and with a rousing trailer suggesting big, bring-the-whole-family things, this could be another serious all-rounder (and an Oscars comeback for co-star Gwyneth Paltrow). I’m not sure if there’s much else to take note of in December, with two old school Oscar plays looking a little too dusty to register. James L Brooks is returning with Ella McCay, the same kind of starry character-driven comedy drama he would have easily aced back in the 80s or 90s but he’s coming off the back of the critical and commercial flop that was 2010’s How Do You Know and a limp, dated trailer implies that this one is dead in the water. There’s maybe something Golden Globes-y about Hugh Jackman and Kate Hudson’s Neil Diamond tribute band comedy Song Sung Blue but it seems an unlikely Oscar pick.
Is there still time for a surprise last-minute release to be slotted into the schedule? The field being as it currently is suggests that there’s definitely space for something …
Seven safe-ish nominee bets
Jessie Buckley – best actress, Hamnet
Ryan Coogler – best director, Sinners
Jeremy Allen White – best actor, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere
Stellan Skarsgård – best supporting actor, Sentimental Value
Dwayne Johnson – best actor, The Smashing Machine
Adam Sandler – best supporting actor, Jay Kelly
Leonardo DiCaprio – best actor, One Battle After Another
