Once upon a time, the late-August, early-September film festivals in Venice, Telluride and Toronto would leave voters and awards watchers with a pretty good idea of what Oscar season was going to look like.
But that was then and this is now. In recent years, the fall festivals haven’t been nearly as effective in setting the awards-season agenda or identifying the major players. Last year’s Best Picture frontrunners “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners” eschewed festivals altogether.
And this year feels as if it could be particularly weak in delivering big awards movies on the Lido in Venice, in the mountains of Telluride or in the theater district in Toronto.
Maybe that’s an overly pessimistic outlook; maybe some gems are waiting to be discovered. But while 400-or-so films will screen once Venice kicks off on Wednesday, Telluride on Friday and Toronto a week from Thursday, it’s likelier that no more than three of the films that will premiere during the fall festivals will wind up with Oscar nominations for Best Picture.
We’re hoping for a little excitement to spice up an awards landscape that has so far consisted of wondering if “The Odyssey” could run the table the way “Oppenheimer” did three years ago, or judging the chances of “Project Hail Mary” or “The Invite” surviving a long season. Let’s look at the landscape.
A Little History
From 2009 through 2018, the Best Picture winner had its world premiere at one of the three festivals nine times in 10 years. “Birdman,” “Spotlight,” “The Hurt Locker” and “The Shape of Water” came out of Venice; “The King’s Speech,” “Argo,” “12 Years a Slave” and “Moonlight” premiered in Telluride; and “Green Book” debuted in Toronto. The only exception was “The Artist,” which touched down in Telluride and Toronto only after premiering in Cannes in 2011.
Since then, though, “Nomadland” is the only big winner to have emerged from a fall festival. “Parasite” and “Anora” debuted at Cannes, “CODA” at Sundance and “Everything Everywhere All at Once” at SXSW, while “Oppenheimer” and “One Battle After Another” skipped the festival circuit entirely.
Last year, only three of the 10 Best Picture nominees premiered in a fall festival: “Bugonia” and “Frankenstein” in Venice and “Hamnet” in Telluride. The year before, “The Brutalist” came from Venice and “Conclave” and “Nickel Boys” from Telluride, but that was it.
Over the last five years, the most frequent festival designation for a Best Picture nominee premiere is a tie between Cannes and “no film festival,” with 13 nominees each. Venice is next with nine, followed by Telluride with seven and Toronto with three.
So overall, it’s logical to think that at best, this year’s festivals will bring a little more than a third of the Oscar nominees.
Sept. 2-12: Venice International Film Festival
Venice is first up, opening on Wednesday with Danny Boyle’s “Ink,” the British director’s look at the 1970s-1980s rise of Rupert Murdoch on the British newspaper scene with the help of Larry Lamb, the editor who engineered the rise of tabloid sensationalism and Page 3 girls with The Sun. The festival’s biggest awards contender appears to be “Wild Horse Nine” from Irish playwright-turned-director Martin McDonagh, who has unleashed John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell in a film that could land him his third consecutive Best Picture nomination after “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” and “The Banshees of Inisherin.”
Another stage-trained writer-director, Florian Zeller, is in the mix with “Bunker,” which was written specifically for its married stars, Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem; it’s hoping to follow in the footsteps of Best Picture nominee and Best Actor winner (for Anthony Hopkins) “The Father” in 2020, rather than the largely ignored “The Son” two years later.
While last year’s Venice lineup included new works from Guillermo del Toro, Yorgos Lanthimos, Jim Jarmusch, Noah Baumbach, Kathryn Bigelow, Paolo Sorrentino, Luca Guadagnino, Gus Van Sant, Werner Herzog and others, this year’s is more modest. Herzog is back with a narrative film, “Bucking Fastard,” as opposed to last year’s documentary, and Paul Schrader continues his late-career activity with “The Basics of Philosophy,” his fifth film since 2021. Director Lee Chang-dong, whose “Burning” was the first Korean film to ever make the Oscars international shortlist, could go further with “Possible Love,” while Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Kore-eda is back with “Look Back,” his second 2026 film after the Cannes entry “Sheep in the Box” and his fifth since his “Shoplifters” was Oscar-nominated in 2019.
A couple of Venice films could vault into the awards conversation via a bit of controversy: Documentary director Lance Oppenheim makes his narrative debut with “Primetime,” in which Robert Pattinson plays “To Catch a Predator” host Chris Hansen, who’s said he’s thinking about suing, and Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney devotes almost four hours to a hot-button trillionaire in “Musk.”
A beefed-up Venice documentary slate could also put the spotlight on “Free Solo” Oscar winners Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin for the harrowing “Everest: The Other Side,” two-time Oscar winner Barbara Kopple for “Union Town,” the filmmakers behind “The Truffle Hunters,” Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw, for “Burgundy,” and Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor for “NAZA,” a documentary about the war in Gaza from two of the directors of the 2024 Oscar winner “No Other Land.”
Sept. 4-7: Telluride Film Festival
Telluride doesn’t announce its lineup until the eve of the four-day festival, which makes it harder to assert with any degree of authority what its biggest awards contenders will be. But you can read between the lines of the Toronto lineup and figure out which films will likely be making a stop in Colorado. (If a movie hasn’t played anywhere else and Toronto bills it as a “Canadian Premiere,” that means it’s playing somewhere in the U.S. between now and when it gets to Canada.)
Based on those hints, Telluride is likely to premiere a handful of films from directors who have flirted with awards recognition in the past. Two years after his “A Real Pain” earned two Oscar nominations, with costar Kieran Culkin winning Best Supporting Actor, Jesse Eisenberg is back with “The Debut,” which stars Julianne Moore as a restless woman whose life is changed when she’s cast in a community theater production.
British director Andrew Haigh’s 2015 drama “45 Years” landed an Oscar nomination for Charlotte Rampling, while his 2023 film “All of Us Strangers” was overlooked by the Academy but lauded by plenty of other awards groups, raising expectations for his new “A Long Winter.” And while Mike Leigh hasn’t had a Best Picture nominee since “Secrets & Lies” in 1996, his new “Tender Loving Care” gives voters another chance to recognize a singular artist. Leigh has said the film will likely be his last.
And for those who remember last year’s “Hamnet” as a Telluride highlight, the 2026 edition will likely contain another movie in which lines from a performance of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” echo through the lives of its characters. Simon Stone’s “Elsinore” stars the long-overdue Andrew Scott as Ian Charleson, the real-life star of the 1981 Best Picture winner “Chariots of Fire,” who took on the title role in a 1989 National Theatre production of “Hamlet” while privately battling AIDS.
Beyond those films, are there big surprises waiting to be unveiled when the Telluride lineup is announced on Thursday morning? There might be, though the films that many are waiting for – Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Digger,” David Fincher’s “The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth,” Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune: Part Three,” Aaron Sorkin’s “The Social Reckoning” – don’t appear to be ready in time for any fall festivals.
Sept. 10-20: Toronto International Film Festival
The biggest of the three festivals, Toronto is also the most oriented toward crowd-pleasing films. Its TIFF People’s Choice Award, voted by festivalgoers rather than a jury, is a reliable predictor of Oscar success, with 16 of its last 18 winners going on to receive a Best Picture nomination and five of them winning the top Oscar. But overall, it premieres fewer best-pic nominees than the other two fall festivals, although it also showcases plenty of awards titles that debut elsewhere.
This year, two of its world premieres have attracted both high hopes and skepticism. “Being Heumann,” the story of disability activist Judith Heumann, is the first movie from director Siân Heder since her 2021 film “CODA” won Best Picture; and “I Play Rocky,” which stars Anthony Ippolito as Sylvester Stallone as he fights to make the 1976 film “Rocky,” is the new work from Peter Farrelly, whose “Green Book” scored its Best Picture win after premiering at TIFF and winning the People’s Choice Award in 2018. Neither of those previous films was universally embraced by critics — but if “Being Heumann” and “I Play Rocky” score well with Toronto audiences, awards watchers underestimate them at their own peril.
Toronto can also be an effective launch pad for surprises, with a recent example being Cord Jefferson’s 2023 People’s Choice and Oscar screenplay winner “American Fiction.” Possible contenders this year could be Chris Rock’s “Misty Green,” with breakout star Rosalind Eleazar; Tim Blake Nelson’s “The Life and Deaths of Wilson Shedd,” with the veteran character actor and playwright directing Amanda Seyfried and Scoot McNairy; Anton Corbijn’s “A Talent for Murder,” with Helen Mirren as aging author Patricia Highsmith; and maybe even the last film added to the lineup, Zack Snyder’s move from sci-fi and comic-book epics to indie drama, “The Last Photograph.”
As usual, Toronto (and to some degree Telluride) will also showcase some of the Cannes movies that are looking to jump-start the fall phase of their awards campaigns, foremost among them Cristian Mungiu’s “Fjord,” Ruysuke Hamaguchi’s “All of a Sudden” and Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s “La Bola Negra.”
Next Up: New York Film Festival
TIFF will wrap up on Sept. 20, only five days before the New York Film Festival kicks off with another Cannes title, James Gray’s “Paper Tiger.” In the past, the festival was often a major player in awards season, regularly premiering Oscar-bound titles from Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and others, but in recent years it has typically landed only a few premieres.
This year, those include Ava DuVernay’s documentary “14th,” a follow-up to her Oscar-nominated and Emmy-winning 2016 doc “13th”; writer and director Tony Gilroy’s “Behemoth!,” starring Pedro Pascal as a cellist; and “A Statement,” a black comedy set at an environmental conference and directed by Tom McCarthy (“Spotlight”).
Together with the Venice, Telluride and TIFF slate, will it be enough to shape awards season and give it a boost of energy? Check back at the end of September.
