5 More Films to Watch: The Best Picture Fight Starts Now
'Conclave', 'Saturday Night', 'The Wild Robot', 'The Brutalist' and 'The Piano Lesson' race to catch on in the next two months
Just eight days ago, The Life of Chuck scored TIFF People’s Choice Awards, yet the Mike Flanagan film still hasn’t announced a distributor. This remains puzzling, especially because, as I wrote last week, the movie could absolutely continue the tradition of People’s Choice winners contending in best picture with the right campaign behind it. Chuck’s awards fate will remain a mystery a bit longer, I suppose, while People’s Choice runner-ups Emilia Pérez and Anora are well on their way to garnering the early attention from Oscar voters.
But what of the movies that did well at TIFF but fell just short of being chosen by the people?
Let’s look at five of those TIFF players now on the next step of their awards season journey, all with reasonable hopes of cracking into the best picture lineup (though some are more likely than others). With the New York Film Festival kicking off this week and many regional festivals coming after that, we’re getting into the pavement-pounding part of awards season — where voters are spread all over the world and every single conversation with them counts.
Who’s likely to win the most hearts and minds between now and the Academy’s Governors Awards in November, where all the biggest hopefuls will be gathered in one place and jockeying for attention in real-time? These five titles are just a start, but put together with Anora and Emilia Pérez offer a pretty good idea of where the best picture race stands at the moment.
I. Conclave (Focus Features)
Given the mid-movie round of applause for Isabella Rossellini and the dramatic gasps that accompanied some of the plot’s pulpier moments, I thought Edward Berger’s papal drama Conclave really did stand a chance of taking home TIFF’s audience award.
But it will have many more chances to play for an enthusiastic crowd; though it’s now moved up its release date from November 1 to October 25, it will still have time to make stops in Middleburg, Virginia, the Hamptons and what I’m told are several other regional film festivals in October.
Conclave may have the visual polish of Berger’s previous film All Quiet on the Western Front (including a perfectly bombastic score from Oscar winner Volker Bertelmann), but the adaptation of Robert Harris’s irresistibly twisty novel about the selection of a fictional new pope is a whole lot more fun. I haven’t really figured out how much of an advantage that is — one of the larger questions about this awards season is how highbrow, artier films like The Brutalist or Nickel Boys will go over compared to bigger crowd-pleasers like Dune Part Two, Gladiator 2 and Conclave.
For now, though, I think Focus has every reason to be bullish. Three acting nominations are absolutely possible, despite the limited screen time for Rossellini and supporting actor contender Stanley Tucci; star Ralph Fiennes, who hasn’t been nominated since The English Patient (28 years ago!) is in an excellent position as well. It’s still hard to tell which way the wind will blow for a best picture winner, but a nominee lineup without Conclave would look strange indeed.
II. Saturday Night (Sony Pictures)
I will never understand how Saturday Night — from a director so closely linked to Toronto that there’s a street corner named after his family — did not make its world premiere at TIFF. Instead Jason Reitman’s new film debuted at Telluride, to a warm response that carried over in Toronto even with a premiere relatively late in the festival, on Tuesday. (Reitman introduced the film by shouting “Live from Toronto, it’s Saturday Night!” Imagine if it had actually been a Saturday!)
Some critics I know loathed Saturday Night and its efforts to recreate the events leading up to the first episode of Saturday Night Live in 1975, But most people, including me, had a pretty good time with it. Deliberately overstuffed to capture the behind-the-scenes chaos of a show nobody had high hopes for, Saturday Night makes it hard to imagine building a campaign around any particular performance. Yes, I did just write above that Isabella Rossellini could be nominated for easily less than 10 minutes of screen time, but she’s a Hollywood legend who has never been nominated. Cory Michael Smith, though excellent as a preening and insecure Chevy Chase, does not come with the same kind of gravitas.
One can certainly imagine a best picture lineup that includes Saturday Night, particularly if it’s a box office hit when it opens wide on Oct. 11 after a smaller platform release. But I can also envision a sole nomination for Reitman and Gil Kenan for their meticulously researched screenplay, or for Jon Batiste’s terrific, propulsive score. At last year’s TIFF, Sony premiered Dumb Money, another well-reviewed film with an excellent ensemble cast, and its awards campaign never got off the ground. It’s time to see if Saturday Night can push further than that.
III. The Wild Robot (Universal Pictures)
Coming out of the Sunday afternoon premiere of The Wild Robot and talking about it with friends, I looked more or less like Rita Wilson describing the plot of An Affair to Remember in Sleepless in Seattle. The film’s reputation for an emotional wallop definitely precedes it, and that will surely be part of the response when it opens wide in theaters this weekend.
Winning the audience award, as many of us thought it might, would have instantly made The Wild Robot a serious contender to break into the best picture race, becoming the first animated film to do so since Toy Story 3 in 2010. Universal will almost certainly still push for that, fresh off its Oppenheimer best picture victory and with only Wicked as its other major contender. Beautifully animated and based on the acclaimed book by Peter Brown, The Wild Robot certainly has the prestige factor to get voters to take it seriously.
But the real clash of the titans will be in the best animated feature race, where Disney is already gearing up for a robust campaign for Inside Out 2 (you might have caught my conversation with Pixar chief Pete Docter in Toronto). Pixar could plausibly position itself as the underdog in this race, coming off some box office disappointments and some critical misses, and Inside Out 2’s incredible box office was a shot in the arm for the industry in the same way Top Gun: Maverick and Elvis were in best picture races past.
The Wild Robot, meanwhile, represents another creative triumph for DreamWorks Animation, which for years caught elbows from critics who compared it unfavorably to Pixar, but has pushed itself to new heights in recent years with surprisingly gorgeous films like Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and the Netflix release Orion and the Dark. FYC ads for The Wild Robot will inevitably remind voters of its painterly, expressive quality, while Inside Out 2 — for all its creative storytelling — looks much more familiar.
Could The Wild Robot still get in for best picture, or maybe even an adapted screenplay nod for writer-director Chris Sanders? Sure! But it’s the best animated feature race — with the Pixar and DreamWorks Animation frenemies will carefully navigate around each other — where the real drama ought to play out.
IV. The Brutalist (A24)
As the only title I’ve written about thus far that’s slated for the New York Film Festival, I expect we’ll be talking more about The Brutalist in the coming weeks; it plays NYFF this Saturday and has already screened there for press, which gave Brady Corbet’s film another round of hosannas.
I don’t think The Brutalist was ever really a contender for TIFF’s audience award, but it’s got a broader audience appeal than you might expect from its violent-sounding title (yes, it’s about a style of architecture, not a personality trait, I know). A midcentury American saga about a fictional architect (Adrien Brody) who survives the Holocaust and starts fresh in Pennsylvania, it’s the closest relative of Oppenheimer we’ve got this year, featuring powerful performances from known stars (Brody, Guy Pearce, Felicity Jones) and gorgeous crafts, from the much-ballyhooed 70mm VistaVision photography to Daniel Blumberg’s phenomenal score. The more headlines the film can get out there about how this thing somehow cost less than $10 million, the more of a miracle it will seem.
For the still-strong segment of the Academy that loves a historical epic, The Brutalist is in the same lane as Gladiator 2 — which nobody has yet seen — and Blitz, which debuts at the London Film Festival on Oct. 9. That’s formidable competition, but The Brutalist is already holding its own, with Corbet giving a long, discursive interview to The Hollywood Reporter that only ought to further burnish his film nerd bona fides.
As I wrote above about Conclave, I don’t know how much power the film snobs will have in the Oscar race this year; two wins for The Zone of Interest last year might represent a sea change, or this might be a year where we swing back to something more like The Life of Chuck. The Brutalist is among my favorite films of the year thus far, though, and to me the sky seems to be the limit.
V. The Piano Lesson (Netflix)
With Emilia Pérez placing for the audience award, Netflix didn’t have too much to worry about coming out of TIFF — and the streamer had a strong launch for The Piano Lesson on top of it. Denzel Washington, who may well be in the race himself for Gladiator 2 later this fall, was on hand to support the film directed by his son Malcolm and starring his other son John David. I spoke to him briefly at the pre-premiere party for The Piano Lesson, where the Washington patriarch seemed remarkably relaxed, joking that it was actually a relief to think his son made a good movie and not just have to praise him for making it anyway.
An adaptation of August Wilson’s play about a Black Pittsburgh family still haunted by ghosts from their life in the Jim Crow South, The Piano Lesson really is good, with a barnburner performance from Danielle Deadwyler (who just barely missed out on a best actress nomination for Till) and genuinely revelatory work from Ray Fisher, best known before now for his role in Zack Snyder’s Justice League. Like Conclave, The Piano Lesson will be making its way to regional festivals before its release, with stops already announced in the Hamptons and Newport Beach, with more to come.
Following the Oscar success of Wilson adaptations Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Fences — directed, of course, by Denzel Washington — The Piano Lesson has every reason to plan to be an across-the-board competitor. Netflix will have to figure out how to balance it with Emilia Pérez, with its two supporting actress contenders in Deadwyler’s category, but that’s a challenge it’s pulled off perfectly well before.