Oscar Season Now: Welcome to the Rest of the Year

Early September is traditionally a quiet time at the multiplex. The last holdovers from the dog days of summer movie season—your Spider-Mans and Odysseys, as well as August risks like Coyote vs. Acme—continue to do dwindling business. Meanwhile new and skewed genre films are taking their chances in the off-season. But for everyone else outside the industry, now’s the time to think about schools reopening and vacations ending. In the biz, though? This is among the most important weekends of the year!

At last, Oscar season has come.

As the cottage industry of year-round awards prognosticators and Oscar bloggers will attest, the rat race to the Academy’s big night never really stops, with the first major film festival of the year occurring at Sundance’s vaunted heights in the dregs of January, even as the previous year’s Oscar race rages on at its fiercest din. There is also the most prestigious fest of the year in the South of France: Cannes. But those events are by design (or posture) supposed to be above the fray of politicking and horse-racing. September, on the other hand, is the month where we get what could be called the Big Four, starting yesterday with the oldest film festival in the world: Venice.

The Venice Film Festival was indeed a novel idea when it was co-founded nearly a century ago by Giuseppe Volpi—a devout fascist who was so enthusiastic about being minister of finance for Benito Mussolini that he named the first festival awards the “Mussolini Cup for Best Italian Film” and the “Mussolini Cup for Best Foreign Film.” Ah, history!

These days Venice has a more respectable reputation as the first of virtually back-to-back events that also include the Telluride Film Festival (beginning on Sept. 4), the Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 10), and the one I’ll eventually cover, the New York Film Festival (Sept. 25). Each has their own legacy and flavor that might be invisible to the casual observer, but they all amount to the building blocks necessary to create momentum in a campaign narrative (or collapse it in abject failure once the critics’ knives come out).

Anora, the Best Picture winner from Sean Baker in 2025, premiered in May’s storied Cannes Film Festival but then built momentum at Telluride and Toronto in September. And while last year’s winner One Battle After Another loudly skipped the fests to have a wide U.S. release like a big damn Hollywood action movie, seven of the 10 Best Picture nominees still played in the September festivals, often more than one. Bugonia and Frankenstein even had their world premieres in Venice, Hamnet in Telluride, and Marty Supreme in New York.

“I think for a filmmaker, you’ve got to just want to get into one, but there is prestige about certain ones that you want to debut and get your first eyes on you,” Clayton Davis, the chief awards editor at Variety, previously told me for Den of Geek magazine. The optics vary of course, with Toronto being seen as more populist while Venice is the most elite since there is a celebrity-dotted jury that gives out the coveted awards, and it invites a literal European sensibility comparable to Cannes. And as Davis noted, “A lot of  people don’t want to blow their  load at Cannes because then you have to sustain the buzz for eight, nine more months.”

Still, this year is intriguing since Venice Film Festival Director Alberto Barbera publicly defended the lack of Hollywood studio movies at Venice, which set the tone for the rest of the Big Four. According to Barbera, none of the year’s remaining Hollywood movies deemed promising enough for Venice were ready in time for September, save Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Tom Cruise’s Digger, but WB “decided to release [the film] by relying on the element of surprise, bypassing all the autumn festivals.”

One might wonder if the dangers that befell Todd Phillips when the same studio brought Joker: Folie à Deux to Venice in 2024 to absolutely scathing reviews and word-of-mouth had something to do with this as well. (In Phillips’ defense, his first Joker somehow won the Golden Lion in Venice in 2019, setting the supervillain movie on a path to be a major Oscar player.)

Be that as it may, this year’s festivals already are lining up some intriguing options. Probably the buzziest film at Venice that no one’s seen yet is Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, which stars Robert Pattinson as To Catch a Predator host Chris Hansen (Pattinson also looks pretty predatory in the trailer). Danny Boyle’s biopic about Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul behind Fox News, The Sun, and the modern day iterations of The New York Post and Wall Street Journal, is also premiering at Venice before going to TIFF. Werner Herzog’s beautifully titled Bucking Fastard, complete with both Mara sisters(!) as twins who must speak in unison is likewise going to TIFF and New York after its Venice premiere.

Meanwhile Jesse Eisenberg’s follow-up to the heart-rending (and awards winning) A Real Pain is The Debut, which charmingly features Julianne Moore as a housewife who loses herself in a community theater play. It’s going to Toronto and then New York, as is A24 stablemate Club Kid, Jordan Firstman’s debut feature about a washed-up party promoter that already made waves at Cannes. Conversely, Tony Gilroy’s palette-cleanser after a decade in Andor and Star Wars land, Behemoth!, will premiere its love letter to writing music for the screen in New York, as will Spotlight director Tom McCarthy’s new dramedy about the world discovering climate change in 1980, A Statement.

… And to just show you how much the industry and world cinema has evolved, so will Takashi Yamazaki’s hotly anticipated Godzilla Minus Zero, which seems to very much have its kaiju-sized eyes set on an Oscar campaign after Godzilla Minus One won for Best Visual Effects in 2024 and was (unfairly) snubbed a Best Foreign Language nod.

Yep, awards season is here, and this time they got a Godzilla. Batten down the hatches.

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