We’re now in a post-Toronto and Venice Film Festival landscape. The fall movie schedule is coming together, so the awards race picture is also becoming clearer. This feels as appropriate time as any to dig into the Academy Awards race and make some sense of the conversations and storylines around these festival movies.
Up until Venice and TIFF, I only felt comfortable considering one of this year’s releases as a probable lock for Best Picture nominee: Dune Part Two. I still feel the same way. But now that these festival movies are gearing up their wide releases and awards campaigns, narratives are being formed to jockey for the remaining nine spots.
A24’s Venice Acquisitions
Before some festival acquisitions and premieres, the conversation around A24’s release schedule was that Sing Sing would come out on top as their most comfortable guarantee in the Best Picture race if not also some acting categories and maybe directing.
Unfortunately, it seems Sing Sing has fallen victim to what in the past has been a strength of A24’s release strategy. The slow-moving, word-of-mouth-driven rollout that past films like Past Lives and Everything Everywhere All At Once had taken and were fueled to Academy Awards success off of has seemed to hurt Sing Sing. The summer came and went and the buzz around the film has seemingly stayed contained to the corner of Twitter that watches this stuff like a hawk.
Where this gets even more complicated is A24’s Venice Film Festival acquisitions. Luca Guadagnino’s Queer and Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist have been two of the hottest titles out of the festival.
The former is getting buzz off the name recognition of a beloved auteur re-teaming with the writer of his previous (instant classic?) film and recruiting a former Bond actor to produce a reportedly extremely sexy period piece based on a well-known novel.
The latter has seemingly exploded to the top of everyone’s watchlist. A three-and-a-half-hour epic with an intermission isn’t exactly the type of movie I would immediately pin as something with a wide enough appeal for awards recognition, but hey, I’m open to it.
Both of these A24 acquisitions make Sing Sing’s path to the Academy Awards a little more complicated. Of course, distributors aren’t shy to campaign multiple films, but having the focus spread between three movies instead of focusing on just one puts some worry in my mind. It’s difficult to make any concrete predictions this far out, but I’m wavering on Sing Sing.
The TIFF Wrinkle
Even though I’m wary to make concrete predictions, Anora has probably been the next closest to Dune in terms of a “sure thing” potential nominee since its Cannes win. Now, with the Sean Baker film coming as the runner-up in the TIFF People’s Choice Award, I see it following a path forged by fellow NEON release Parasite. I’m not trying to compare the quality or impact of the two, just looking at the information available about its reception among festival the crowd.
The more notable Toronto storyline that adds a much-needed interesting wrinkle to the Best Picture race is The Life of Chuck winning the People’s Choice Award. The Mike Flanagan-directed adaptation of the Stephen King novella still doesn’t have distribution (expect that to change by the end of the week), but has now given itself the ultimate underdog story by winning a major key festival award.
Since 2012, every TIFF People’s Choice Award winner has gone on to be nominated for Best Picture, with 4 of those 12 nominees going on to win the thing. This could be the year that the trend breaks, but I’m not betting against it. The People’s Choice Award is a clear indicator of audience preference in terms of North American taste, which is probably the most important audience to capture en route to an Academy Awards campaign (although in recent years the Academy has become more global).
I’m keeping an eye on The Life of Chuck. This year, I have about 5 movies that I feel will be pretty strong consensus contenders. But after that, the bottom falls out and those other 5 slots are, at this point, wide open.
We’ll see. I’ll check back in next month.