Next year’s Oscar for best picture goes to...
Race is about to heat up as Venice, Toronto film festivals get ready to roll
To comprehend the state of Western film culture today, you need to decode the quietly extraordinary roles Venice and Toronto play in shaping the Oscar race. The two festivals are by no means obvious bedfellows. Venice, the oldest festival around (it predates Cannes by 14 years), is La Dolce Vita incarnate — films at the Palazzo del Cinema until dusk, then rippling laughter and the pop of Prosecco corks. Toronto, meanwhile, is almost certainly the busiest: it’s a bustling Where’s Waldo? tableau of modern movie-going, with an annual attendance approaching half a million, and the most exhaustive approach to programming I’ve ever seen.
The 2017 edition offers 305 features and shorts across 14 themed strands — and that’s a thin year. Yet between them, the two seem able to predict what’s about to be hot in cinema. Of the last 10 films to win best picture at the Oscars, from No Country For Old Men to Moonlight, every one of them played Venice or Toronto first — and in three cases, both. Certain berths have taken on a kind of talismanic significance: five out of the last 10 opening-night films at Venice have gone on to be nominated for best picture, and one, Birdman, won outright, while Toronto’s audience award has prefigured three best picture wins and a further five nominations in the last decade. An example for the ages was La La Land last year: the Venice opening-night film and the winner of the Toronto audience award, it was the presumed best picture front-runner right up until Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway tore open the envelope, and arguably for a few minutes after that. It may not have actually won, but its commercial performance, built entirely on its must-see status forged at Venice and Toronto, presumably went toward making up for it.
All of which is to say that where the coming Oscar season is concerned, a shortlist of serious players is about to snap into focus. This year’s Venice opening film is Downsizing, a sciencefiction-inflected comedy from Alexander Payne, the director of Sideways and Nebraska. Starring Matt Damon, Kristen Wiig and Christoph Waltz, it’s about a married couple who have themselves shrunk to pocket size.
Opening Toronto has historically been a less auspicious gig, but this year’s sporting biopic Borg/McEnroe might change that — though I gather Battle of the Sexes, with Emma Stone and Steve Carell as Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, is the 2017 tennis film to beat.
The films screening at both festivals are often the ones that have awards-watchers bristling with anticipation, and none look bristlier than Mother! — a thriller from Darren Aronofsky, with Jennifer Lawrence as a housewife whose home is invaded by a series of odd visitors, seemingly with the consent of her husband, who’s played by Javier Bardem.
Striking a different tone, you’d imagine, is Stephen Frears’ Victoria and Abdul — perhaps a spiritual sequel to John Madden’s Mrs Brown, with Judi Dench reprising her BAFTAwinning role as Queen Victoria, now platonically besotted with her young Indian attendant, Abdul Karim.
Andrew Haigh will bring the followup to his superb 45 Years, a horse-training drama titled Lean on Pete, to both festivals — and Martin McDonagh, the BritishIrish director of In Bruges, will do likewise with his dark comedy Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, featuring Frances McDormand as a grieving mother who goes to war with her local police.
Joe Wright’s Churchill biopic Darkest Hour, Andy Serkis’s Breathe, Clio Barnard’s Dark River and Armando Iannucci’s political comedy The Death of Stalin are all Toronto-only as is The Breadwinner, the latest animated feature from the Irish studio Cartoon Saloon, whose previous film, Song of the Sea, also surfaced at the Canadian festival.
It’s only fair to note that Moonlight actually showed up first at Telluride, a four-day “boutique festival” sandwiched in between Venice and Toronto.
One likely dead cert for Telluride is The Shape of Water — a gothic fantasia from Guillermo del Toro, in which a mute woman, played by Sally Hawkins, befriends an amphibious humanoid held captive in a laboratory.
One of the presumed-heftiest Oscar contenders-in-waiting, Steven Spielberg’s Nixon-era newsroom thriller The Papers, seems unlikely to screen anywhere until December. Paul Thomas Anderson’s ’50s fashionworld drama Phantom Thread, another December release, features Daniel Day-Lewis’s final screen performance.
Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk has already set a high bar for best picture. But few things are less gripping than a foregone conclusion, and the race is about to get interesting.