The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg just put it this way,
“The eventual best picture Oscar winner has played at the Toronto International Film Festival in each of the last seven years. The fest’s 2014 edition gets underway tonight. Will the streak continue?”
In other words, the last film not to play at TIFF was the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, which had opened already so no festival screening necessary, ditto the year’s prior winner, The Departed. Crash came the year before and that also didn’t need the festivals. Million Dollar Baby was the year before that and it, too, didn’t play the fest circuit.
The only film to play Toronto but not Telluride in the last seven years was The Hurt Locker, which went to Toronto the year before it won Best Picture. Every other film played Telluride first.
What’s the main difference? It looks like films that are headed for the Oscar race do not open to general audiences until after they have a festival launch pad. Even the films that screen in Cannes have a long road before they’re open in theaters — like 2011’s winner, The Artist. Do distributors need the festivals to build the necessary hype for awards to boost opening box office?
Running the gauntlet during the festivals is a great way to get the negative hype out of the way. If a film can withstand all of the high praise, backlash to the high praise, sudden controversies that come from a need to find filler and draw traffic, patching up those controversies — then it can pretty much find solid footing in the Oscar race. That is why all of the films that have won over the past seven years have had plenty of lead time heading into the race.
If you skip all of that, you can swoop in at the last minute, make a lot of money, earn many nominations but might find the backlash and the controversies hitting right about the time people start voting for winners, at which time they seem to go for the more reliable success rather than the one they’re not that sure about. Argo vs. Zero Dark Thirty, for instance.
All of these theories are just theories, of course. Any rule we build up is destined to get shot down the following year. The funny thing about the Oscar race is that is always feel wide open until suddenly, it doesn’t. With Telluride behind us and Toronto starting now, the Best Picture winner should theoretically have been seen already. But which movie could that be?
If Telluride/Toronto doesn’t produce a Best Picture winner could New York? Or might the winner fall outside the fest circuit entirely? Let’s break them down, shall we?
Best Picture contenders so far
Before festivals | Cannes | Telluride | Toronto | New York | After festivals |
Boyhood | |||||
Budapest Hotel | |||||
Foxcatcher (11/14) | Foxcatcher | Foxcatcher | Foxcatcher | ||
Mr. Turner (12/19) | Mr. Turner | Mr. Turner | Mr. Turner | ||
The Homesman | The Homesman | ||||
Clouds of Sils Maria | Clouds of Sils Maria | Clouds of Sils Maria | |||
Birdman (10/17) | Birdman | ||||
The Imitation Game (11/21) | The Imitation Game | ||||
Rosewater (11/7) | Rosewater | ||||
Wild (12/5) | Wild | ||||
99 Homes | 99 Homes | ||||
71 | 71 | 71 | |||
The Judge (10/10) | |||||
Men, Women and Children (10/1) | |||||
St. Vincent (10/24) | |||||
Theory of Everything (11/7) | |||||
The Good Lie (10/3) | |||||
The Equalizer | |||||
Cake | |||||
The Keeping Room | |||||
Manglehorn | |||||
Miss Julie | |||||
The Riot Club | |||||
Still Alice | |||||
Time Out of Mind | Time out of Mind | ||||
Whiplash (10/10) | Whiplash | ||||
Nightcrawler | |||||
Gone Girl (10/3) | |||||
Inherent Vice (12/12) | |||||
Fury (10/17) | |||||
Interstellar (11/7) | |||||
American Sniper (12/25) | |||||
Big Eyes (12/25) | |||||
Into the Woods (12/25) | |||||
Selma (12/25) | |||||
Unbroken (12/25) |
Last year 12 Years a Slave and Gravity came out of the festivals. American Hustle did not. Looking at all nine of the Best Pic nominees from last year it went like this:
12 Years a Slave (Telluride)
Gravity (Venice)
Wolf of Wall Street (out of festival competition)
American Hustle (out of festival competition)
Nebraska (Cannes)
Captain Phillips (NYFF)
Philomena (Toronto)
Dallas Buyers Club (Toronto)
Her (New York)
2012
Argo (Telluride)
Amour (Cannes)
Beasts of the Southern Wild (Sundance)
Django Unchained (out of festival competition)
Les Mis (out of festival competition)
Life of Pi (New York)
Lincoln (out of festival competition)
Silver Linings Playbook (Toronto)
Zero Dark Thirty (out of festival competition)
2011
The Artist (Cannes)
Tree of Life (Cannes)
The Descendants (Telluride)
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (out of festival competition)
The Help (out of festival competition)
Hugo (New York)
Midnight in Paris (out of festival competition)
Moneyball (Toronto)
War Horse (out of festival competition)
2010
The King’s Speech (Telluride)
The Social Network (New York)
127 Hours (Telluride)
Black Swan (Venice)
The Fighter (out of festival competition)
Inception (out of festival competition)
The Kids Are All Right (Sundance)
Toy Story 3 (out of festival competition)
True Grit (out of festival competition)
Winter’s Bone (Sundance)
2009
The Hurt Locker (Toronto, the year prior)
Avatar (out of festival competition)
A Serious Man (Toronto)
An Education (Sundance)
District 9 (out of festival competition)
Inglourious Basterds (Cannes)
Precious (Sundance)
The Blind Side (out of festival competition)
Up (out of festival competition)
Up in the Air (Telluride)
The conclusion: a film has an equal chance of a nomination if it shows out of competition, at Sundance or any other film festival. The winners, though, going back to at least 2008, have all come from films seen at festivals.
The only possible explanation I can think of for this is that when a film is underestimated it has a lot better shot at winning than when it’s overestimated. Moreover, the tried and true contender has run the gauntlet and come out unscathed. A late comer would need more time, unless it was an unequivocal winner, to have enough time to deflect the backlash, live down the hype, and prove itself to be “the one.”
As far as this year goes, we have a few bankable titles already for Best Picture nomination at least:
Boyhood
The Imitation Game
Foxcatcher
Birdman
Those are the BIG THREE I would take to the bank for a nod, even though several pundits like David Poland and Jeff Wells have their doubts about Foxcatcher because it is so ice cold. Think: Great film. That’s what you have with Foxcatcher and any voters with a pair of real balls hanging between his legs is above the whole “sentimental weepy” nonsense.
Similarly, there is much silly chatter about whether Birdman will be “too divisive” for a nod. Again, idle talk from people who are doing too much psychoanalyzing. Birdman is, more than anything, an ACTORS movie. It doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks. It’s way in and one of the three RIGHT NOW that can win, the other two being Boyhood and The Imitation Game.
That’s four out of a probable nine.
If I had to spitball the other five right now, sight unseen, I’d go with:
Gone Girl
The Theory of Everything
Unbroken
Into the Woods
American Sniper
Less sure about how “they” will vote, given that they have ONLY FIVE slots to nominate a Best Picture
Interstellar
Selma
Big Hero 6
Big Eyes
Fury
The Homesman
The Clouds of Sils Maria
Inherent Vice
Wild
99 Homes
If voters still had ten options to nominate for Best Picture this would be an easy call but you have to predict Best Picture like you’re actually picking five, not nine. Think five and then work with spillover. Would you choose Interstellar with five? Nolan got in with Inception when voters had 10. Ditto Big Hero 6 or any animated film. When voters had ten slots they nominated Up and Toy Story 3. When they had five slots they stopped nominating animated films for Best Picture.
Thinking five, shit starts to get real.
The same theory could be made for Gone Girl, Birdman and Foxcatcher — will voters pick the film with five if it isn’t “feel good” enough? It’s possible they will do as expected of them and vote with their hearts, not with that thing that got them into filmmaking in the first place: the reach for great cinema no matter what form it comes in.
Already I am feeling the familiar dynamic begin to form, like a full blown hurricane off the coast of Mexico: heroic people doing heroic things vs. dark characters doing terrible things. This always reminds me of that exchange from A Few Good Men, “I want the truth!” “You can’t handle the truth.” And so it goes, with Oscar as with so many other things, voters reach for that idealized human condition where we do good things and make the world a better place. The flip side of that, of course, is that the human condition is formed out of light AND darkness. At its best, art does not sacrifice one for the sake of our eternal comfort but instead dives headlong into that struggle to confront who we really are.