As the fall festivals come to a close, the awards season is slowly taking shape but without a substantial amount of sure things, questions remain
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here’s been a longtime dominance of fall festivals in the Oscar race, the majority of contenders premiering at Venice, Telluride and Toronto, leaving little room for other routes to victory. For a 13-year period, between 2007 and 2020, there were only two best picture winners that hadn’t travelled that way, and that pair had both premiered at a festival anyway, just slightly earlier at Cannes.
But since the pandemic shifted how so much of the industry operates, the past few years have seen unusual variation. Coda became the first best picture winner from Sundance, Everything Everywhere All at Once the first from SXSW, Oppenheimer the first non-festival premiere to win since The Departed in 2006 and the past six years has seen Cannes with more best picture wins than any other festival. It’s meant that at this particular time of year, as we sift through the good and bad of the fall festivals, it’s harder than ever to predict the race.
At the start of the year, Sundance was light on awards buzz, at least within the narrative space. Jennifer Lopez tried to sing and dance her way to her first Oscar nomination in Bill Condon’s Kiss of the Spider Woman but it feels like a Golden Globe nod might be more realistic, the film getting a mixed reception on the ground. Rose Byrne has a better chance, spiralling down a less conventional route in the bruising dark comedy If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, but the film might be too (deliberately) uncomfortable for voters. The most likely pick seemed to be the period drama Train Dreams, starring a potential best actor nominee in Joel Edgerton and Oscar nominees Felicity Jones and Kerry Condon, after it sold to Netflix for a reported deal of about $10m. The streamer then held the film for the fall festival circuit where it has maintained its slow and steady buzz.
