And next year’s Oscar for Best Picture will go to…

You might not have noticed, but August 30 will be a pivotal date in cinema history. It’s the furthest we’ll ever be this year from the Academy Awards, with the 2017 and 2018 ceremonies lying exactly 185 days in either direction. Except this coming August 30 is also the opening night of the 74th Venice International Film Festival, which means the distance until next Oscar night is about to feel a lot shorter. Both Venice and its sister festival, Toronto, which opens a week later, are about much more than the starting line for the annual Monte Carlo or Bust!- style pursuit towards the stage of the Dolby Theatre. But 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 – and in turn, the tastes of cinemagoers in Britain and the world.

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 til dusk, then rippling laughter and the pop of prosecco corks. Toronto, meanwhile, is almost certainly the busiest: it’s a bustling Where’s Wally? tableau of modern moviegoing, 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.

This is, it should be pointed out, a fairly recent development. Scan the 10 Best Picture winners before No Country For Old Men, and you’ll notice only two of them, American Beauty and Crash, came from Venice or Toronto.

Lots of factors are at play here, from shifting tastes to changes in key festival personnel. But there’s no question that with more films for audiences (and awards voters) to chew on than ever before, having the right kind of launch, and tracing the right kind of arc, have become instrumental parts of being noticed. 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. True, it may not have actually won, but its commercial performance, built entirely on its must-see status forged at Venice and Toronto, presumably went

This is the time of year when studios start premiering the films they think can wow the Academy. Robbie Collin reveals the main contenders s A lot of buzz surrounds Emma Stone’s depiction of Billie Jean King