Feasting on Festival News
Oscar season, start your engines!
Yes, I realize it’s late July and this sounds a tad crazy. But this week brought not one, but two huge festival lineups, which means we have our first good look at the films that could be our Oscar season front-runners.
I’m Rebecca Ford, and over at Awards Insider we kicked off our week analyzing the Venice Film Festival lineup, which is the first major festival of awards season. It’s a packed lineup with too many highlights to include in this little newsletter, but I’d say some of my most anticipated include Todd Field’s return to filmmaking with Tár, starring Cate Blanchett, and Noah Baumbach’s White Noise, which is serving as the festival’s opening night film.
It looks like we’re in for some transformation performances, especially with Brendan Fraser, who will play a grieving 600-pound man in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale—and, of course, the much buzzed-about transformation of Ana de Armas into Marilyn Monroe for Blonde.
Not to be outdone, the Toronto International Film Festival released its full lineup on Thursday. It’s also packed with world premieres, despite being the third major festival in the fall lineup. (Telluride is held just before TIFF, but won’t announce its lineup until the first day of the festival.) Among its world premieres are Sony’s Devotion, a powerful war film about a groundbreaking fighter pilot played by Jonathan Majors, and The Good Nurse, a thriller about a serial killer starring Eddie Redmayne and Jessica Chastain. I’ve seen both of those films for our first-look features, and while I can’t say much, I can say that the TIFF audience will be in for a treat.
Other films possibly launching their Oscar season campaigns at TIFF include Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light, a romantic drama starring Olivia Colman set in the 1980s, and Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, which has a strong ensemble cast that includes Rooney Mara and Frances McDormand. Both of those films are likely to show up at Telluride as well, based on the way they’re described as “Canadian Premiere” and “International Premiere,” respectively, on the TIFF announcement.
While it’s fun to try to read the tea leaves now based on these announcements, we’ll know much more in a little over a month—once we’re at the festivals and seeing many of these films for the first time. Stay tuned for Awards Insider’s exclusive first looks for many of them, which will hit the site over the next month.
Until then, we’ve got plenty of Emmy content as we inch closer to voting, from interviews with veteran talents like Dale Dickeyand Karyn Kusama to deep dives with below-the-line talent. It’s been a fun run covering this year’s batch of Emmy nominees, but after this week’s flurry of festival announcements, I have to admit I’m feeling like fall can’t come soon enough!
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