The 2022-2023 film awards season arrives in full force on Wednesday with the first screenings at the Venice Film Festival, and this year the season will be coming in strong after two lackluster years.
Right? It’s it is It’s going to come strong, right?
Please?
That’s the feeling in the community that I like to think of as Hollywood’s Kudo Industrial Complex. That community limped through a year, 2020, in which theaters were closed, film festivals were canceled or moved online, and almost all shows were virtual; and a second year, 2021, which began as a cautiously muted season but was then caught off guard by a resurgence of COVID that forced a return to streaming and virtual events.
With the Venice Film Festival kicking off on Wednesday, followed by the three-day Telluride Film Festival on Friday and then the gargantuan Toronto International Film Festival next Thursday, there’s a palpable longing for things to get back to normal. normal. In fact, you could say it’s a desperation for the days of packed screenings and raving crowds at the Lido or in the mountains or on Canadian streets.
After all, here’s a little bit of what the next two and a half weeks will bring:
Noah Baumbach! Alejandro G. Iñárritu! Sam Mendez!
Darren Aronofsky, Martin McDonagh, Werner Herzog, Rian Johnson, Peter Farrelly, Gina Prince-Bythewood!
Steven Spielberg!!
Plus on-screen appearances by Jennifer Lawrence, Colin Farrell, Hugh Jackman, Olivia Colman, Jessica Chastain, Eddie Redmayne, Nicholas Cage, Viola Davis, Daniel Craig, and double doses of Florence Pugh and Harry Styles!
No constant COVID-19 testing! Fewer travel restrictions!
But just as box office receipts came back strong with “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Elvis” a few months ago, only to dry up when studios faltered in their commitment to theatrical release, there’s no real guarantee that fall festivals …the Venice/Telluride/Toronto overlapping trio, followed two weeks later by the New York Film Festival, everything will run smoothly and healthily. Nor that they will lay the groundwork for the kind of solid awards season everyone desperately wants to see.
As usual, Venice has many prestigious films and international productions, but it also has its fair share of films whose creators and sponsors have award aspirations beyond the international categories. The first of these is Noah Baumbach’s adaptation of Don DeLillo’s novel “White Noise,” starring Adam Driver, which opened the festival on Wednesday.
Other Venice entries include Darren Aronofsky’s “The Whale,” with a supposedly revitalizing performance by Brendan Fraser as an overweight man trying to reconnect with his daughter; “The Banshees of Inisherin,” in which Irish playwright and director Martin McDonagh (“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”) reunites with his “In Bruges” stars Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson; Andrew Dominick’s “Blonde,” starring Ana De Armas as a fictionalized version of Marilyn Monroe; “The Son,” with Hugh Jackman and Laura Dern starring in “The Father” director Florian Zeller’s stage play adaptation; Olivia Wilde’s “Don’t Worry Darling,” with Florence Pugh and Harry Styles; and “Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths,” a Spanish-language fantasy by Alejandro G. Iñárritu, which follows the path of Iñárritu’s Oscar-winning “Birdman” by playing Venice and Telluride but not Toronto.
At least we think he’s going to Telluride as of this writing. The Colorado festival is coy about not announcing its lineup until the day before the event begins, which this year means the lineup will be revealed on Thursday, September 1, with the first performances on Friday. Still, it’s no secret that “Bardo” will likely be there, along with the world premieres of Sam Mendes’ “Empire of Light,” set in a movie theater in an English seaside town in the 1980s; Sarah Polley’s “Women Talking,” with a cast that includes Frances McDormand, Claire Foy, Rooney Mara and Jessie Buckley; “The Wonder”, with Florence Pugh and Ciaran Hinds in a film by director Sebastian Lelio, whose “A Fantastic Woman” won the international Oscar a few years ago; and “Theater of Thought,” a new documentary from a director, Werner Herzog, who comes to Telluride so often he has a theater named after him.
Other likely Telluride bookings include the first US showing of films that debuted at European festivals, including several from Venice and others from Cannes, including James Gray’s autobiographical “Armageddon Time,” James Gray’s harrowing “Holy Spider,” Ali Abassi and Charlotte Wells’ romance “After the Sun.”
The Toronto festival is the last (although it starts before Venice ends) and is by far the largest of the three events; a lot of the movies from Venice and Telluride also make their way to Toronto. But TIFF also has some prestigious world premieres of its own, with a particularly impressive one-two punch on Saturday night September 10: Rian Johnson’s “Knives Out” sequel, “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” at at 6 pm, followed by Steven Spielberg’s Semi-autobiographical “The Fabelmans” at 9:30. Spielberg’s film in particular is a big blow for Toronto, as the director often forgoes fall festivals and releases his films later in the year.
Other TIFF premieres will include “The Good Nurse” with Jessica Chastain and Eddie Redmayne, “The Woman King” with Viola Davis starring director Gina Prince-Bythewood, “Butcher’s Crossing” with Nicholas Cage, “Bros” starring Billy Eichner, “Causeway” with Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry and “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story,” which probably won’t be an awards movie but will provide the odd spectacle of Daniel Radcliffe playing Weird Al Yankovic in an admittedly mock biopic.
And while most of the more notable TIFF titles will be released between the festival’s opening on September 8 and its first Monday, September 12, it’s worth waiting for a film that won’t open until September 13. In 2018, Peter Farrelly’s “Green Book” had something of a stealth opening in Toronto that Tuesday night, slipping into the festival after the would-be lead actors had screened; it ended up winning the TIFF Audience Award and later the Oscar. for Best Picture So it’s probably no surprise that Farrelly’s new movie, “The Greatest Beer Run Ever,” with Zac Efron, is taking up the same slot as Tuesday night.
On paper, “Beer Run” doesn’t seem like one of the biggest award contenders; that list would probably start with “Empire of Light” and “The Fabelmans” and also include “Bardo”.
But really, we don’t need to know just yet which films will come out of this series of festivals in the strongest position. What’s more important to contenders, activists, and observers alike is that Venice, Telluride, and Toronto are back to being regular film festivals — that is, crowded, communal, and as COVID-free as possible.
Yes that happens, we could be on our way to a normal awards season, or at least a reasonable facsimile of one. And wouldn’t it be nice for a change?
