Venice, TIFF, and Oscar Season’s Great Hope |
The Venice and Toronto film festivals unveiled their lineups this week, featuring some of the fall’s buzziest Oscar contenders—and a whole bunch of enticing question marks. As my colleagues and I discussed on the latest episode of Little Gold Men, it’s a bit like Christmas morning for dedicated awards observers. We can all start unwrapping packages filled with possibility.
True, many of them will gradually lose their luster over the next few months. But oh, there are so many presents to unwrap on this particular Friday!
I’m David Canfield, and my texts are already filled with theories on the narratives that could define the season. Will Dwayne Johnson move all the way to his first Oscar nomination from the glitzy Venice premiere for Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, featuring what looks to be his most transformational performance to date? Will a curated launch for Hamnet in Telluride—where we can infer the film is premiering, since its Toronto launch is labeled a “Canadian premiere”—bring past best-director winner Chloé Zhao back to the fore of the awards conversation? How will Netflix juggle what appears to be its most competitive slate in years, top-lined by Oscar-winning directors Guillermo Del Toro and Kathryn Bigelow?
We haven’t heard whether the likes of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and Jeremy Allen White’s Bruce Springsteen vehicle Deliver Me From Nowhere will sneak a Telluride screening or hurtle straight into a wide release. We still don’t know much about that other Safdie/A24 joint, Josh’s Marty Supreme, except that its Christmas release date and its cast led by Timothée Chalamet and Gwyneth Paltrow both feel awfully Oscar-friendly. There’s also word that Bradley Cooper’s undated new movie Is This Thing On? may still be out this year. And that’s just scratching the surface of the unknown.
For now, let’s rejoice in what we do know: In about a month, movies by all of those aforementioned directors, plus Park Chan-wook, Noah Baumbach, Yorgos Lanthimos, Nia DaCosta, Paul Greengrass, and so many more, will start unveiling themselves. They won’t all deliver as we hope. But for now, each still has the chance to. |
