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The Road to the Oscars Begins: Film Festivals That Shape the Awards Season

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Each September, the road to the Academy Awards begins in earnest.

Before critics’ prizes are handed out, before guilds weigh in, and long before Oscar nominations are announced, four of the world’s most influential film festivals — Telluride, Venice, Toronto and New York — introduce audiences to the films, performances and filmmakers that will dominate awards season.

In a typical year, roughly 80 per cent of eventual Best Picture nominees screen at one or more of these festivals.

The first stop is the 53rd Telluride Film Festival, held high in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado over the Labour Day weekend, from September 4 to 7.

Telluride remains the most mysterious of the major festivals. Organizers refuse to announce the programme in advance, unveiling approximately 40 films only as attendees arrive in the picturesque mountain town.

That secrecy has become part of Telluride’s appeal.

Festival-goers routinely discover surprise screenings of films that go on to become major Oscar contenders. This year’s Guest Director is acclaimed British-American actress and filmmaker Rebecca Hall, who has curated a special programme celebrating overlooked classics and significant works from cinema history.

Alongside anticipated North American premières of prize winners from Cannes and Berlin, cinephiles will once again be searching for the festival’s inevitable “discovery”— the film nobody was expecting that suddenly becomes an awards frontrunner.

Almost simultaneously, attention shifts across the Atlantic to the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, running September 2–12 under the artistic direction of Alberto Barbera.

The world’s oldest film festival remains its most glamorous.

Every year the Lido becomes a showcase where international stars arrive by water taxi against the backdrop of the Venetian lagoon, while photographers line the red carpet awaiting the next iconic image.

Yet beneath the glamour lies one of cinema’s most important launching pads. Recent Golden Lion winners and Venice premières have gone on to claim Best Picture and Best Director Oscars with remarkable regularity.

This year’s Venice Biennale competition is especially rich.

Among the most anticipated films are Martin McDonagh’s 1970s-set black comedy Wild Horse Nine — which, by the way, is the Closing Gala film this year at the 45th annual Vancouver International Film Festival — starring John Malkovich and Sam Rockwell; Florian Zeller’s marital drama Bunker, featuring Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem; Werner Herzog’s long-awaited, Bucking Fastard, starring sisters Kate and Rooney Mara; Casey Affleck’s directorial effort, Company; Andrea Pallaoro’s The Echo Chamber, with Alicia Vikander and Susan Sarandon; Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, starring Robert Pattinson; and highly anticipated new works from Lee Chang-dong and Hirokazu Kore-eda.

Venice’s red carpets will be equally crowded with Dakota Johnson, Pamela Anderson, Claire Foy, Orlando Bloom, Paul Dano, Parker Posey, Stephen Graham and Phoebe Bridgers, making her formal acting début in A24’s Primetime.

Noel and Liam Gallagher are also expected to reunite publicly while promoting the Oasis documentary, Don’t Look Back in Anger.

The festival’s combination of artistic prestige and celebrity spectacle makes Venice one of the defining events of the international film calendar.

North America’s largest public film festival follows immediately afterward.

The 51st Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) runs September 10–20 and remains the industry’s première North American launching pad for prestige cinema.

TIFF opens with Sian Heder’s Being Heumann and closes with Yan Lanouette Turgeon’s Villeneuve: The Rise of a Legend. Unlike Telluride’s exclusivity, Toronto welcomes hundreds of thousands of moviegoers, creating an atmosphere unlike any other festival.

Audience enthusiasm frequently helps propel films into the awards conversation, with the festival’s coveted People’s Choice Award having become one of the strongest predictors of eventual Oscar success.

This year’s lineup includes new films from celebrated auteurs Mike Leigh (Tender Loving Care), Takashi Miike (Bad Lieutenant: Tokyo), Anton Corbijn (A Talent for Murder), Lee Chang-dong (Possible Love), Andrew Haigh (A Long Winter), Jesse Eisenberg (The Debut), James Gray (Paper Tiger), Chris Rock (Misty Green) and Rebel Wilson (Girl Group).

TIFF will also showcase an impressive slate of Canadian productions, continuing its long-standing commitment to homegrown filmmaking, while serving as an international marketplace where distributors search for the season’s breakout hits.

The final major stop on the autumn festival circuit is the 64th New York Film Festival, presented by Film at Lincoln Center from September 25 through October 12.

Unlike Toronto, New York rarely emphasizes world premières. Instead, it curates what its programmers believe represents the very finest cinema of the year, drawing acclaimed selections from Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Telluride and Toronto into one strong Main Slate. For many cinephiles, NYFF offers the year’s most rigorously curated programme.

The festival’s Centerpiece Gala will be the world première of Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth!, starring Pedro Pascal, while Ava DuVernay’s documentary 14th, a follow-up to her Oscar-nominated 13th, will close the festival.

Rumoured selections include new films from Pedro Almodóvar, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Paweł Pawlikowski, Radu Jude, Takashi Yamazaki and Ira Sachs.

“The festival’s ambition is to reflect the state of cinema in a given year, which often means also reflecting the state of the world,” says New York Film Festival artistic director Dennis Lim. “The most notable thing about the films in the Main Slate is the degree to which they emphasize cinema’s relationship to reality.”

By the time New York concludes in mid-October, the contours of the Oscar race will largely have been established. Critics will have identified the year’s breakthrough performances, studios will begin refining their awards campaigns, and cinephiles will already be debating which films deserve Academy recognition.

For Vancouver audiences, the excitement will not end there.

Many of the year’s most acclaimed festival selections are expected to, and will, screen at the 45th Vancouver International Film Festival, running October 1–11, giving local movie lovers an opportunity to see many of the season’s most celebrated films months before Oscar nominations are announced.

Announced on August 26th at this year’s VIFF Media Launch,  VIFF programmers have curated perhaps the strongest array of films at VIFF in many, many years, including the Opening Gala film: Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut, starring Julianne Moore and Paul Giamatti.

Also débuting: Cannes winners Fjord, La Bola Negra, and audience favourite, Club Kid, and so very much more.

Plus: Minotaur, The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, and Mike Leigh’s final film, Tender Loving Care.

The 45th Vancouver International Film Festival Programme Guide is already online, ready for you to begin purchasing your tickets — or pass — to this year’s festival.

Purchase tickets or a pass to #VIFF 2026 by clicking here.

Each Friday throughout September, VanRamblings will publish a VIFF Insight column in the hopes of preparing you for VIFF 45.

Come October, once the festival is fully underway, VanRamblings will provide coverage each of the two first weekends — given that Monday through Thursday, we’ll be providing in-depth coverage of this year’s Vancouver municipal election —  with VIFF coverage each Friday, Saturday and Sunday in early October, on October 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 9th, 10th, and the final day of this year’s festival, Thanksgiving Monday, October 11th.

For anyone who loves cinema, September is far more than the beginning of awards season.

September announces the annual celebration of the art of filmmaking itself — the moment when the world’s greatest directors, actors and storytellers unveil the films that will shape conversations for the year ahead.

Arts Friday | 2022’s Film Festival Season | An Oscar Season in Preview

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With cooling weather finally having taken hold, and the heat of the summer season soon to be but a fond memory, today VanRamblings will set about to preview the always provocative cinematic season of serious import,  the fall film festival season

As we discover each September, autumn is the season for all of our senses.

The feel of cooler temperatures after a long summer. A warm, visually pleasing palate of reds, oranges and browns. The taste of pumpkin spice in everything.

The sound of crunching leaves underfoot.

The smell of woodsmoke.

Like spring, autumn is a season of transition, a reminder of the value of change, in this case from a bright, buzzing, verdant summer of picnics in the park, towards the darker, quieter, more redolent calm of autumn and winter. It’s a journey inward; first experiential, then intellectual, delving into the collective unconscious.

“Autumn light is the loveliest light there is,” wrote author Margaret Renkl. “Soft, forgiving, it makes all the world an illuminated dream.”

In a cinephile’s world, dreams come to the fore in the fall through the release of films which will take on Oscar importance in the winter season to come.

Telluride, Venice, Toronto, New York each early autumn introduce the films which will fill our film consciousness over the many months yet to come.

The first of the important later summer film festivals occurs amidst the mountain landscape of Telluride, Colorado, which locale will be overrun with cinéastes over September’s Labour Day weekend, where prestige filmmakers ranging from Canada’s Sarah Polley (Women Talking), Luca Guadagnino (Bones and All), Sam Mendes (Empire of Light), Alejandro G. Inarritu (Bardo), Todd Field (TÁR), Sebastian Leilo (The Wonder), and Scott Cooper (The Pale Blue Eye) are set to garner the most buzz among the film cognoscenti, each of these filmmakers recipients of much past Oscar glory, each film highly anticipated, each film Oscar bound.

Overlapping the Telluride Film Festival is the 79th annual Venice International Film Festival, the Biennale Cinema, which will run from Wednesday, August 31 thru Saturday, September 10, where many of the films débuting at Telluride stateside will also feature in the star-studded Venice locale.

The big buzz film in Venice this year is White Noise, Noah Baumbach’s first film since Marriage Story. White Noise is a zany adaptation of Don DeLillo’s seminal novel about a Hitler Studies professor (Adam Driver) and his beleaguered wife (Greta Gerwig) whose lives are threatened by a toxic event.

Also at Venice: Andrew Dominik’s evocative drama Blonde, starring Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe, who disappears into the role as she struggles to cope under the glare of the spotlight. Add Bobby Cannavale as her second husband, Joe DiMaggio; Adrien Brody as her third husband, Arthur Miller; meticulous production design & luminous cinematography, and you have a potential awards-season juggernaut, streaming on Netflix Sept. 28th.

Olivia Wilde’s psychological chiller, Don’t Worry Darling, sees Florence Pugh and Harry Styles embody a picture-perfect ’50s couple whose unbridled passion for one another turns to suspicion when the former begins to fear that something sinister lurks beneath their carefree existence. Prepare for jump scares, glorious interiors, and Chris Pine as the film’s menacing mastermind.


A TIFF programme screen capture of Steven Spielberg’s autobiographical film, The Fabelmans

As the Telluride and Venice festivals wrap, the film festival season focus will turn to a renewed Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), now in its 47th season, running from Thursday, September 8th through Sunday, September 18th, as TIFF marks a return to its pre-pandemic days of in-person screenings, after two scaled-down editions spent in hybrid mode the past couple of years.

The big buzz film débuting in Toronto this year is Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, which will have its world première at this fall’s TIFF, with the iconic Oscar-winning director attending TIFF for the first time ever.

A long-in-the-works semi-autobiographical film, The Fabelmans is described by producers as a “deeply personal portrait of 20th-century American childhood,” which focuses on a family based in post-Second World War-era Arizona, the film following the young Spielberg facsimile Sammy Fabelman (played by Gabriel LaBelle) as he grows up with his father (Paul Dano), mother (Michelle Williams) and uncle (Seth Rogen). After discovering a “shattering family secret,” Sammy dives into the wonder of cinema to cope and find a path forward.

With a screenplay by regular Spielberg collaborator Tony Kushner (Munich, Lincoln, and last year’s West Side Story), The Fabelmans is Spielberg’s latest shot at awards-season glory. The film’s première represents a huge coup for TIFF.

The New York Film Festival  has lined up titles from Kelly Reichardt, Claire Denis, Alice Diop, Joanna Hogg, and more for its Main Slate this year. Women directed or co-directed 13 of the 32 Main Slate films, amounting to about 41%.

The NYFF has returned to the city that never sleeps for its 60th year at the Lincoln Centre, which recently announced Laura Poitras’ new documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, to serve as the festival’s Centerpiece film. A story about art, politics, addiction, and David v. Goliath battles, the documentary chronicles the life of photographer Nan Goldin and her fight to hold the Sackler family accountable for their role in the opioid epidemic.

Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest, the Léa Seydoux-starring romantic drama One Fine Morning, is also part of the Main Slate, as are Claire Denis’ Stars at Noon; Kelly Reichardt’s Showing Up; Joanna Hogg’s The Eternal Daughter; Alice Diop’s Saint Omer; Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun; and Marie Kreutzer’s Corsage.

Another Oscar bound film? Clemency director Chinonye Chukwu’s Till, a biopic about the lynching of Emmett Till, and his mother’s pursuit of justice.

As has been the case since it’s inception 41 years ago, the NYFF runs in tandem with the Vancouver International Film Festival, our somewhat truncated festival set to run from from Thursday, September 29th through Sunday, October 9th.

The importance of festivals to culture and society cannot be underestimated, as they set about to provide empathetic insight into our often confusing world. Film festivals also provide the opportunity to switch off your everyday life, to become enmeshed in the lives of people from across the globe.

Arts Friday | The Much Anticipated Autumn Film Festival Season Underway

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In 2021, wherever a film festival may take place, appropriate COVID protocols will be in place, including mandatory masks in the screening rooms and common areas, and proof that cinephile patrons have been vaccinated.

The pandemic – particularly given the ravages of the COVID-19 fourth wave – will probably mean, and has meant at the Telluride and Venice film festivals, prejudiced attendance numbers at fall film festivals. As was the case in 2020 – and once again will be so in 2021 – films on offer will be made available for home viewing, with a small number of films  available exclusively for in-person screenings. In other words, in order for film festivals to “work” in 2021, festival directors have adopted a “hybrid model” to satisfy the viewing demands of their loyal patrons.

At Telluride and Venice, major film studios made their star-driven, Oscar contending film slates available to these two prestigious film festivals, as will be the case in Toronto – which got underway yesterday – and later this month in Gotham City, at the 59th annual New York Film Festival, which will share half their slate with VIFF.

At Telluride and Venice, Hollywood stars turned out in all their finery, engaging in post screening discussions with audiences, sitting in rapt & appreciative attention.

Above is a clip of Japanese-English director Will Sharpe’s The Electrical Life of Louis Wain, a whimsical Victorian biopic starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Claire Foy — which, it was announced at the annual Vancouver International Film Festival media conference has been selected as VIFF40’s opening night film, on October 1st.

“Movies are a distraction from reality,” says a character in Paolo Sorrentino’s Hand of God — which débuted at Telluride — a sprawling, funny-sad, autobiographical coming-of-age story. That’s a good thing. Reality is drab and painful — “lousy,” according to the film’s English subtitles — and film provides a much needed respite.

The break-out Oscar contenders that débuted at Telluride include …

Cyrano, a lovely new telling of the classic story of Cyrano de Bergerac, which had its world première at Telluride, and took that film festival by storm — with guaranteed Oscar nods all around;

https://youtu.be/MUnsoxe7K4g

The North American première of Spencer, the mesmerizing new drama starring Kristen Stewart (a guaranteed Best Actress Oscar nominee) as Princess Diana; and

The crowd-pleasing King Richard, a drama charting the rise of tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams, expected to launch Will Smith into the Oscar race for his portrayal of the girls’ demanding dad and coach, Richard Williams — a loving, egocentric father who, it turns out, did know what was best for his daughters.

Céline Sciamma’s exquisite Petite Maman — which débuted at the Berlinale, and has been set as VIFF40’s closing night film (cuz it’s VIFF programmer, Curtis Woloschuk’s, favourite film at VIFF this year, he told VanRamblings earlier in the week — don’t tell anybody, though, cuz it’s a secret) — a delicate film full of surprises. Sciamma, whose Portrait of a Lady on Fire was a VIFF standout in 2019 (at the pre-pandemic VIFF festival), examines female intimacy from a different angle.

Nelly and Marion (played by young twins named Joséphine and Gabrielle Sanz) are 8-year-old girls living in similar houses in the woods. They strike up a friendship tinged with elements of fairy-tale supernaturalism, magical realism and time travel. The twists packed into the film’s compact 72 minutes arrive gently and matter-of-factly. The intense emotions they leave behind — this is one of the quietest tear-jerkers you’ll ever see — are at once familiar and wholly new.

Soon, the sane and responsible among us will be fully vaccinated and in possession of our province-issued vaccine card — making attendance at movie theatres, restaurants, bars and pubs safer and more enjoyable for the vast majority of us.

As much as COVID’s fourth wave will keep us in its troubling grip, for the most part it is the anti-social unvaccinated amongst us who will bear the malignant brunt of the coronavirus — for the rest of us, a return to a near normal state of being holds promise for our immediate future, and the prospect of an autumn movie-going season sitting amongst our brothers and sisters inside a darkened movie theatre.