A GUIDE TO HOLLYWOOD’S BIGGEST RACES
AUGUST 06, 2021
An Uncertain Fall Clouds Awards Season
Of late, we’ve had a stretch of good news for the specialty box office—and in turn, for distributors behind this coming season’s biggest awards contenders. The Green Knightbrought out a huge crowd for A24, bolstered by great reviews and canny marketing, and audiences have shown up for other smaller, acclaimed titles like the Questlove doc Summer of Soul and the Winston Duke vehicle Nine Days. Just in time for fall, right?
Maybe not, as the delta COVID-19 variant rears its head. I’m David Canfield, and in my conversations with insiders of late, one theme has emerged: There’s plenty of uncertainty, if not quite nervousness (yet), in Hollywood right now. While hardly a big contender, Paramount’s decision to pull Clifford the Big Red Dog from the September schedule despite reportedly strong tracking, and lose its Toronto International Film Festival premiere spot from there, felt ominously familiar, echoing spring 2020’s trickle of delays that started with blockbusters like No Time to Die and didn’t ever seem to stop.
I’ve heard from sources in several studios that TIFF is at this point unlikely to feature a substantial in-person presence of media and talent, at least on the scale of what we saw in Cannes or what we’re still expecting to see in Telluride and Venice. (As one person put it, the best way to think about TIFF 2021 right now is as a local festival, like Chicago or Miami.) It’s currently being billed as a virtual/in-person hybrid, though to what extent virtual festivalgoers have access remains to be seen.
TIFF boasts some significant world premieres nonetheless—specifically The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a biopic for which Jessica Chastain and Andrew Garfield have nomination hopes, and Dear Evan Hansen, the already meme-ified musical adaptation of the Broadway smash. Their positioning, as delta cases continue to rise (they’re slated for exclusive theatrical launches), looks particularly unclear; ditto fellow September releases The Card Counter and Blue Bayou. Will anybody else move?
The word, so far, is probably not. But this is not looking like the fully “back to normal” Oscar season the industry was hoping for regardless. Over in television, even, a quickly approaching in-person Emmys is slowly raising some eyebrows; a vaccine mandate for attendees was announced last week, and we can expect more precautionary measures to follow. The show must go on, though, and this edition of Awards Insider is all about celebrating the work that keeps it running—from this summer’s many intriguing Oscar long shots to some of this year’s most exciting Emmy nominees.
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