Steve Pond's Awards Beat: The Films to Watch as the Fall Festivals Kick Off Another Weird Oscar Season

Steve Pond's Awards Beat: The Films to Watch as the Fall Festivals Kick Off Another Weird Oscar Season No images? [Click here]( ID=167008;size=700x180;setID=347001;uid={EMAIL}5680012;click=template_awards_beat [Awards Beat with Steve Pond] August 27, 2021 [- - -] The Films to Watch as the Fall Festivals Kick Off Another Weird Oscar Season The Venice, Telluride and Toronto fests will still be affected by the pandemic, but a robust selection of contenders will be jockeying for momentum [- - -] By Steve Pond [fall festival Dear Evan Hansen The Eyes of Tammy Faye The Power of the Dog] “Dear Evan Hansen,” “The Eyes of Tammy Faye,” “The Power of the Dog” (Courtesy of TIFF) For the second consecutive year, the fall film festivals will begin under the shadow of COVID. And that means that just as in 2020, the 2021 awards season will get an uncertain launch from the Venice Film Festival, which begins on Wednesday, Sept. 1 and runs through Sept. 11; the [Telluride Film Festival](, which kicks off its four-day run two days after Venice; and the Toronto International Film Festival, which launches the following week, on Thursday, Sept. 9 and runs through Sept. 18. If you thought last year brought a weird awards season, with virtual premieres and awards shows and an elongated schedule, welcome to another COVID awards season kicked off by another group of festivals unable to act as if business is anywhere close to usual. Last year, Venice was scaled down, Telluride was canceled and Toronto was a virtual event for everybody except Canadian residents. And unlike most years, the majority of the films that went on to land Best Picture nominations at the Oscars did not premiere at any of the big three fall fests: Aside from “Nomadland,” which debuted in Venice premiere and “Sound of Metal,” which first unspooled in Toronto back in 2019, the field was made up of four Sundance premieres and two Netflix films that didn’t play any festivals at all. The scarcity of fall-festival movies hardly came as a surprise after the way the pandemic changed last year’s awards season, with the Oscar calendar elongated by two months and films allowed to qualify without any theatrical exhibition at all. But even with a dismal showing compared to a usual year, the fall festivals’ 14-year streak of showcasing the eventual Best Picture winner held strong with Chloé Zhao’s “Nomadland.” ID=167008;size=300x250;setID=284833;uid={EMAIL}5680012;click=template_awards_beat So maybe – probably? – the next Best Picture winner will be one of the films that will be unveiled in Venice, Telluride and/or Toronto over the next 22 days. Venice will be bigger than it was in 2020, and it has a robust slate of potential awards contenders; Telluride is back, at least for the fully immunized, and ready to unveil some of its own heavy hitters; and Toronto will welcome out-of-town press and guests even as it retains the virtual component that worked well for it last year. Those three festivals, followed a couple weeks later by the New York Film Festival’s world premiere of Joel Coen’s [“The Tragedy of Macbeth,”]( will likely give us a look at a significant slice of awards season –– perhaps not as big a slice as in the pre-pandemic days, but bigger than last year.  And if that’s the case, we can hazard a few guesses about what movies might come out of the festivals with awards momentum. Venice, which in recent years has launched launched “Birdman,” “Spotlight,” “The Shape of Water,” “Joker” and “Nomadland,” has an extremely strong lineup and will [host the world premieres]( of Denis Villeneuve’s “Dune” (Warner Bros.), his large-scale adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic, and Jane Campion’s “The Power of the Dog,” a drama starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Kirsten Dunst that will play nearly all of the fall festivals prior to its Netflix debut. (Last year, Netflix kept all of its films out of festivals; this year, it’s back at festivals with some of its starriest contenders.) Read the rest of Steve Pond’s Awards Beat [column here](.  Read Steve Pond’s recent Awards Beat coverage [HERE](. [- - -] [Follow us on Facebook]( [Follow us on Twitter]( [Follow us on Instagram]( [Follow us on Linkedin]( TheWrap 2260 S. Centinela Ave. Suite 150, Los Angeles, CA 90064 [Preferences]( | [Unsubscribe]( This email was sent to {EMAIL}. If you are no longer interested you can [unsubscribe instantly](.