Film festivals fire the starting gun on Oscars race

Festivals in Venice, Colorado and Toronto have become early predictors of Oscar nominees in recent years.

Reese Witherspoon in a scene from the film Wild. Anne Marie Fox / Fox Searchlight Pictures / AP Photo

Hollywood’s awards season is months away, but for many the race for Oscars gold has already started, with strong contenders emerging from key film festivals this month.

While it is too early to talk of front-runners – unlike last year when 12 Years a Slave established itself early as a contender – several movies and actors are already generating buzz.

Steve Carell, Benedict Cumberbatch and Reese Witherspoon are among the actors whose performances are being touted, while the unique coming-of-age drama Boyhood is among the films being talked about as a possible nominee for the coveted statuette.

“Summer is over ... it’s back to school and it’s become so for the academy,” says Glenn Williamson of the School of Theater, Film and Television at the University of California, Los Angeles, referring to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which hosts the annual Oscars show in February.

Three key festivals – Venice, Telluride and Toronto – overlapped this year, with the industry going to Italy from August 27 to September 6, Telluride from September 4 to 7 and Canada from September 4 to 14.

Last year, the historical drama 12 Years a Slave by the British director Steve McQueen, which went on to win the Best Picture Oscar, made a huge impact at Telluride.

It was then screened in Toronto, where it took the People’s Choice Award before sweeping a string of awards season prizes on its way to Hollywood’s highest accolade, the Academy Award.

Telluride has become increasingly important in generating awards momentum over the past decade because many of the academy’s 6,000 or so voting members attend, says Williamson.

He recalled that the buzz around The King's Speech – which went on to win the Best Picture Oscar in 2011 – began in the small Colorado village.

Good movies go to Toronto and secure crucial media coverage at a festival known for negotiations for financing and distribution, he added. “It’s a bit more towards business. Venice is also a big splashy opportunity to get publicity.”

But generating awards buzz – and nabbing the prizes – is notoriously unpredictable. Some think that launching a film too early in the year is risky, preferring a later debut closer to the Academy’s voting time.

But Abigail Severance, a professor at the California Institute of the Arts School of Film, disagrees. “I don’t think that a performance is forgotten by the time” award voters cast their ballots, she says.

No single film has yet to emerge from this year’s pack, although a few are jostling for position.

Boyhood, by Richard Linklater, is one of them. A film made with the same group of actors over a span of 12 years is a moving tale of a boy's transformation into a young man.

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) by Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu impressed in both Venice and Toronto and will also close the New York Film Festival this month, with the former Batman star Michael Keaton as an actor famous for portraying a superhero struggling with getting old and trying to rekindle his career.

In Toronto, Black and White saw Kevin Costner battling Octavia Spencer (who won the Best Actress Oscar for 2011's The Help) for custody of his mixed-race granddaughter. His performance has some predicting a repeat of the Oscars glory he enjoyed with 1990's Dances with Wolves.

Carell is also tipped to be in the Best Actor race with Foxcatcher, based on a true story, in which he plays a member of the monied Du Pont family implicated in an Olympic scandal.

The sober performance is in stark contrast to his usual comic roles, a feat the Academy has been known to reward.

The British actor Benedict Cumberbatch has impressed in The Imitation Game as Alan Turing, the British scientist who cracked Nazi codes during the Second World War. Another performance as a British egghead – by Eddie Redmayne as the physicist Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything – is also seen as an early contender.

Witherspoon could be in the running for her second Oscar after 2006's Walk the Line, with several strong performances including Wild, The Good Lie and Inherent Vice, in which a detective probes the disappearance of an ex-girlfriend.

The Mexican actor Gael García Bernal is also tipped as a possible nominee for his portrayal of a journalist jailed in Iran in Rosewater, the directorial debut of Jon Stewart, best known as the host of the satirical news show The Daily Show.

The 87th Academy Awards will be held on February 22.