Letting the Film-Festival Dust Settle
It can be hard to sift through all of the noise coming out of Venice, Telluride, and Toronto, but as Hollywood moves from Emmys to Oscars season—as it did more abruptly than usual over the weekend, with some folks (including yours truly) covering TV’s biggest night from Canada—we can take a moment to take stock. I’m David Canfield, fresh from two weeks of nonstop moviegoing at the fall’s biggest film festivals. There was so much hype for so many contenders, so the question now becomes: What’s sticking, and who’s in it for the long haul?
Out of screening dozens of movies, speaking with voters and folks on the ground, and gauging audience and critical reception, I see five movies, particularly, following their festival bows with strong chances at best-picture nominations: Venice’s Tár and The Banshees of Inisherin, Telluride’s Women Talking and Empire of Light, and Toronto’s The Fabelmans. Some will run as less accessible critical darlings (Tár) while others will seek to overcome mixed reviews with very strong Academy appeals (Empire of Light). Certainly, more potential breakouts emerged than just those five, including The Whale and The Woman King, two less obvious-on-paper Oscar players (beyond their lead actors) that emerged as audience favorites, and prize-winning Cannes holdovers Triangle of Sadness and Decision to Leave.
Tár’s Cate Blanchett and The Whale’s Brendan Fraser were introduced on the Lido to rave reviews for their performances and currently top the class in their respective lead-acting fields. As I see it, their top competition currently rests in earlier 2022 launches—Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Michelle Yeoh, who’s all over the festival circuit right now, and Elvis’s Austin Butler, who’s expected to campaign heavily this fall. Throw in other major actor introductions from the past few weeks—The Woman King’s Viola Davis, Empire of Light’s Olivia Colman, Banshees’ Colin Farrell—and we’ve got a lot more to talk about in these top categories than we did a few weeks ago.
On the other side of this are films that didn’t hit as hoped, perhaps, looking for a kind of awards revival. In Toronto, The Son did not play well at all, after meeting a slightly better reception in Venice; Florian Zeller’s divisive follow-up to The Father faces a difficult road, but Hugh Jackman is still out there in the hope of crashing a fairly thin best-actor field. Netflix also saw disappointing bows for both White Noise and Bardo out of Venice; the former opens New York Film Festival later this month, where Noah Baumbach may meet a warmer reaction in his hometown, and the latter finds itself in a more severe mode of reassessment, as the length alone of Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s messy epic could prove prohibitive to recognition in top categories. News was better for the streamer in Toronto, where Knives Out sequel Glass Onionand the crime thriller The Good Nurse emerged as instant audience hits.
Speaking of which: All eyes now, as I write this, on Toronto’s people’s choice award—nowadays, nearly always a harbinger of a best-picture nominee, and sometimes of the winner. Movies like Green Book and Jojo Rabbit were hit with mixed reviews in Toronto before winning that award, and then going on to win major Oscars. This year’s top three will surely feature a mix of expected top contenders, like Fabelmans and Banshees. But if a tearjerker like The Whale or a commercial crowdpleaser like Glass Onion, say, slots into Toronto’s top three? The race already gets a little more complicated—and we’ve got a long way to go.
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