OSCAR BAIT?
CHRIS KNIGHT ON TIFF AS AN AWARD PREDICTOR.
Is the Toronto International Film Festival an Oscar launch pad, as its champions have l ong maintained? Or is it just one more unexceptional stop on a long path to awards-season glory?
No doubt about it; a lot of movies that screen at the Toronto festival go on to Academy Awards recognition. Last year, five of the nine best- picture nominees played TIFF, including the eventual winner, Moonlight.
Ironically, Moonlight screened in the second year of the festival’s Platform program, with a three-person jury and a $25,000 prize. But they chose to give that award to Jackie, starring Natalie Portman, whose acting nomination was that film’s only major Oscar nod. The People’s Choice, long a bellwether for Oscar glory, went to La La Land, which briefly seemed to win best picture when an envelope mix- up led to the wrong name being called.
The previous year, TIFF was four- for- eight in screening bestpicture nominees, again including the winner, Spotlight. (Room, which was the People’s Choice that year, was also among the nominees.)
But patriotic Toronto audiences can be forgiven for forgetting that there are a host of other festivals out there. From a seat in the Lightbox at King and John streets, it’s easy to overlook the fact that for the past five years, every best- picture winner screened at the tiny but influen- tial Telluride festival first. Three of them — Moonlight, 12 Years a Slave and Argo — premièred there, while two more — Birdman, Spotlight — started in Venice before heading to the Colorado festival.
You have to go back to 2011 and The Artist to find a best- picture winner that missed Telluride. Michel Hazanavicius’ silent blackand-white drama The Artist premièred in Cannes that year and then went to festivals in Moscow and Montreal before finally landing at TIFF.
And it was all the way back in 2004 that a best- picture winner actually premièred in Toronto; Paul Haggis’s Crash played at TIFF that September, then disappeared for a while before being released the following April.
Also, one has to wonder if there’s much Oscar bragging rights to be had when your event seems to play everything under the sun. Last year, before the festival announced it was scaling back its program by 20 per cent, there were just shy of 400 films at TIFF, 296 of them features. This year there are only 255 — a 14 per cent drop but who’s counting? In any case, it’s still a behemoth next to Telluride’s average run of 30 titles.
Studios have also started to wonder whether the prestige of any festival opening is worth the potential of having a spotlight shone on one’s bad press. This is particularly true at the Cannes festival, where Sean Penn’s The Last Face ( 2016) and Gus Van Sant’s The Sea of Tress ( 2015) were so roundly booed that they never recovered. They eventually slunk into theatres, earning a few thousand dollars apiece.
Last year, TIFF’s gala screenings — the ones with the red carpets and the nicest venues — were a mostly lacklustre bunch. They kicked off with The Magnificent Seven remake, closed with The Edge of Seventeen, and included A United Kingdom, Snowden, A Monster Calls, Their Finest, The Promise and nine more than garnered not a single Oscar nomination.
To be fair, one of last year’s galas, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, went on to eight Oscar nominations including best picture, and a win for sound editing. Galas Deepwater Horizon and Loving also got a few nominations, including one for Ruth Negga as best actress.
And TIFF aficionados know that you have to look past the flashbulbs to find the real flash. Recent years have given viewers such non- gala hits as Green Room ( in Midnight Madness), Lady Macbeth (Platform), Maudie and Manchester by the Sea (Special Presentations) and Sleeping Giant (Discovery).
But the oddity about the festival- to- Oscar race is that one never knows the narrative until it’s played out. Goldderby. com, an Oscar prediction site so eager to jump in the game that it’s currently listing nine-to-one odds for “Untitled Paul Thomas Anderson Movie,” has high hopes for a number of TIFF titles — Call Me By Your Name, Downsizing, The Shape of Water, Battle of the Sexes — as well as some that will skip the festival completely, like Steven Spielberg’s The Post and Richard Linklater’s Last Flag Flying.
Whether the Toronto festival and it’s People’s Choice Award will once more lay perhaps dubious claim to providing an Oscar push remains to be seen. But with 255 movies set to screen over 10 days, it’s going to be a lot of fun finding out.
The 42nd annual Toronto International Film Festival is scheduled to be held from Sept. 7 to 17. This edition includes 255 feature-length films and 84 short films. Of the feature films, 147 are world premières. The number of Canadian films at the Festival is listed as 28 features and 29 shorts.