To find an Academy Award winner for Best Picture that didn’t first play at the Toronto International Film Festival, one has to look all the way back to 2006 when The Departed took home the award. Since then, every single Best Picture winner, from No Country for Old Men to Argo has played on Toronto screens (with two of the eventual winners, Slumdog Millionaire and The King’s Speech, taking home the People’s Choice Award). Sure, some of these films premiered at Cannes or Telluride, but they all played at TIFF on their way to Oscar gold, speaking to the festival’s importance as a launching pad for Oscar campaigns.
So, if you play your cards right at this year’s TIFF, you might just catch the next “Best Picture” before anyone else. Exclusively watching Oscar contenders is hardly the most rewarding way to experience TIFF, but Oscar prognostication is almost as fun as it is useless, so here’s a look at five films playing at this year’s TIFF that will very likely be nominated for something next February.
August: Osage County, directed by John Wells
Tracy Letts is a Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, but thus far, his only plays to have been adapted into feature films were Bug and Killer Joe (the latter of which premiered at TIFF in 2011). Those two plays were Letts’ earliest works, made for independent theatre communities where they garnered critical acclaim, but not much in the way of mainstream acceptance. The ensuing films were dirty low-budget affairs, and both were directed by the similarly dirty-minded William Friedkin, who whole-heartedly embraced the gape-jawed (in more ways than one) response that followed Killer Joe’s notorious “chicken wing” scene. August: Osage County, however, is a different beast. It’s the play that turned Tracy Letts into “Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Letts.” It’s a southern family drama with a meaty role at the centre for three-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep. The cast also includes Julia Roberts, Chris Cooper, Ewan MacGregor, and Benedict Cumberbatch, so, if nothing else, expect Osage County to pony up a few nominations in the acting categories.
The Fifth Estate, directed by Bill Condon
The Fifth Estate is the most anticipated film of the year coming from the director of a Twilight film. That’s not really fair, Bill Condon also directed Dreamgirls, Kinsey, and Gods and Monsters, yet Condon’s most recent two films The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Parts 1 and 2, are by far his most profitable. Regardless, The Fifth Estate is also the most topical film of the festival, detailing the rise of WikiLeaks and its effect on the consumption of mainstream news. If the trailer is any indication, Condon’s film will deliver a slice of real-world verisimilitude in the vein of The Social Network. Of course, WikiLeaks is nowhere near as relevant in 2013 as Facebook was in 2010, but Benedict Cumberbatch, seemingly the breakout star of this year’s festival, is set to give one of those uncannily accurate lead performances as Australian shit-disturber Julian Assange, who has already accused the film of being a “massive propoganda attack.”
12 Years a Slave, directed by Steve McQueen
By now, you may or may not know that Steve McQueen is not just the name of that badass old school Hollywood star that tried to jump the fence on a motorcycle in The Great Escape, it’s also the name of a British artist-turned-filmmaker that gave the world Hunger and Shame, two art films about Michael Fassbender having a really bad time. In 12 Years a Slave, Chiwetel Ejiofor takes over as the tortured McQueen protagonist, a free black man from New York who gets betrayed, kidnapped, and sold into slavery in the South. Fassbender returns, but this time he’s playing a sadistic slave-master. If the trailer feels a bit too ready to accept its Oscar, remember that trailers can lie, and McQueen’s Hunger offered some of the most harrowing scenes of prison brutality ever put to film. If any subject deserves “the McQueen treatment” (unflinching portrayals of physical brutality), it’s the horrifying plight of American slaves. 12 Years a Slave promises to be the anti-Django Unchained, treating slavery with honesty instead of a translating it into a hackneyed revenge fantasy. The cast includes Paul Giamatti, Alfre Woodard, and, you guessed it, Benedict Cumberbatch. Also, Brad Pitt plays a Canadian. With a chinstrap.
Blue Is the Warmest Color, directed by Abdellatif Kechiche
Blue Is the Warmest Color might be three-hour, French-language film and about a lesbian affair between two students, but it also won the Palme D’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, which means it comes to Toronto as one of the festival’s highest profile foreign films, and thus becomes one of the safest bets for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Picture. The director, Abdellatif Kechiche, is a two-time César Award (the French equivalent of the Oscar) winner, and Blue already seems likely to net him his third. The film is based on a graphic novel by Julie Maroh, who has already spoken, “as a feminist and lesbian spectator,” about her problems with the film’s graphic lesbian sex scenes, which she compared to porn. Before you expect this criticism to put a damper on the film’s award prospects, remember that the Academy is 77 per cent male. Not all of them are straight, but a good deal of them are, and in my experience, straight men tend not to have issues with pornographic lesbian sex scenes.
Labor Day, directed by Jason Reitman
When Jason Reitman comes to TIFF, he likes to say that his films play at the Ryerson Theatre instead of Roy Thompson Hall because that’s where Juno, his breakout film, premiered in 2007. In reality, placing films in the Special Presentations programme (where they can play at the Ryerson), means they can also be snuck into the Telluride Film Festival the week before TIFF, just like Reitman’s Up In The Air in 2009. Given the pedigree behind Labor Day, I wouldn’t be surprised if it followed a similar pattern. For one, the film stars Kate Winslet, who probably finds it difficult not to get nominated for an Oscar, and it deals with the heady subject of an adolescent boy (Gattlin Griffith — what a name!) who takes care of his emotionally damaged mother. The younger Reitman’s already has two almost-wins in his pocket with Juno and Up in the Air. The Academy obviously loves him, if not as much as they love Winslet, and Labor Day, his fifth feature, could be the one that gets him one of those little naked men.
TIFF commences on September 5 with films screening at various theatres across the city for ten days. Tickets can be purchased from the TIFF website. Keep an eye on Toronto Standard for more coverage of the festival in the coming weeks.
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Alan Jones writes about film for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @alanjonesxxxv.
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