Best Picture 2024: How Film Festivals Shape the Race

The first big get for this year’s major film festivals (aka, the kickoff for Oscar season) has been announced: Taika Waititi’s Next Goal Wins will have its World Premiere at TIFF. From Variety:

“Next Goal Wins” stars Michael Fassbender as a down-on-his-luck coach who is hired to turn around the world’s worst soccer team so they can qualify for the World Cup. Searchlight Pictures is backing the film, which is based on the 2014 documentary about the American Samoa soccer team, who were infamous for their brutal 31-0 FIFA loss in 2001. Oscar Kightley, Kaimana, David Fane, Rachel House, Beulah Koale, Uli Latukefu, Semu Filipo, Lehi Falepapalangi, Will Arnett and Elisabeth Moss round out the cast.

Following its debut in Toronto, “Next Goal Wins” is scheduled to be released in theaters on Nov. 17.

The 48th edition of TIFF runs from Sept. 7-17. The full festival schedule will be released in August.

In general, and of late (post Oscar Night date change, circa 2003) film festivals have been the best way to launch a movie. That isn’t always true, of course. No festival can match the winning record that Telluride once had, not even Toronto. The Venice/Telluride two-step has produced plenty of Oscar Best Picture nominees and winners, though post-Great Awokening, things have most definitely shifted.

Here’s why: the priorities are no longer particularly focused on finding the best film that sizzles. The priorities now are to see which films can best meet the moment with inclusivity in terms of the director, the cast, or the story. That takes priority now over almost everything, from box office, to critics awards. Although critics are now part of the same organism — if not the ground zero of the virus — that has created this atmosphere of inclusion riders that seem to influence all film awards, they still have the need to encircle films that can’t ever win Best Picture (like Drive My Car, ROMA, etc).

Let’s look quickly at where our BP’s have come from since 2000:

2000 – Gladiator – general release, May 1, 2000 (back when audience support still mattered).
2001 – A Beautiful Mind – general release, December 13, 2001
2002 – Chicago – general release, December 27, 2002
2003 – Return of the King – general release, December 17, 2003
2004 – Million Dollar Baby – general release, December 5, 2003
(DATE CHANGE)
2005 – Crash – Toronto Film Fest (release date May 6, 2005)
2006 – The Departed – general release, September 26, 2006
2007 – No Country for Old Men – Cannes Film Festival, (release date November 9, 2007)
2008 – Slumdog Millionaire – Telluride Film Festival (release date December 25, 2008)
2009 – The Hurt Locker – Venice Film Fest the year before — (release date June 26, 2009)
2010 – The King’s Speech – Telluride Film Festival (release date December 23, 2010)
2011 – The Artist — Cannes Film Festival (release date November 23, 2011)
2012 – Argo — Telluride Film Festival (release date October 12, 2012)
2013 – 12 Years a Slave — Telluride Film Festival (release date November 8, 2013)
2014 – Birdman — Venice/Telluride (release date October 17, 2014)
2015 – Spotlight — Venice/Telluride (release date November 6, 2015)
2016 – Green Book — Moonlight — Telluride Film Festival (release date October 21, 2016)
2017 – The Shape of Water — Venice/Telluride (release date December 1, 2017)
2018 – Green Book — Toronto Film Festival (release date November 16, 2018)
2019 – Parasite — Cannes Film Festival (and Palme d’or winner), release date (release date October 11, 2019)
2020 – Nomadland — Venice (release date N/A COVID)
2021- CODA — Sundance Film Festival (release date August 13, 2021)
2022 – Everything, Everywhere All At Once — SXSW Film Festival (release date March 25, 2022)

It should be noted that, in addition to the date changes for the Oscar race, something else happened around 2003. The Harry Potter franchise ignited the box office, which would then lead to a greater dominance of franchise movies overtaking most of the top box office slots. Studios would make a gazillion dollars doing this but they would also alienate Oscar voters. The Weinstein model of Oscar campaigning made it very easy for the Oscar voters to insulate themselves from the new economic reality of Hollywood and the chasm between these two diverging roads was never wider than in 2008 when The Reader was nominated and The Dark Knight was not.

That is why the Academy expanded the field of Best Picture nominees, thinking that would be a way to include more of the genre movies that had overtaken Hollywood. But that isn’t what happened. Oscar voters simply chose to nominate more of the movies they had always liked, movies that were made for them, movies that we sometimes call “hothouse flowers.” They often exist to serve a niche audience at best, and use the Oscar race as a way to keep the balls spinning and their insular economy rolling.

Those two divergent paths, the two opposing industry concerns, would eventually come to reflect the schism separating two Americas, with the majority of Americans tuning out the Oscars completely.

It should be noted that there have been exceptions. The King’s Speech and Argo both made money and seemed to make their way into the general mainstream consciousness. I would also add an exception to last year’s winner, Everything Everywhere All at Once which most definitely had a shelf life outside the Oscar race, drew in new audiences and made good money.

CODA seemed to perhaps portend the future fate of the Oscars by moving the the kind of movie traditional Academy members preferred to a streaming platform, and thus eliminating the pressure of meeting box office expectations. But in abandoning the free market and the input of the general public, Oscar movies have painted themselves into a corner. When COVID hit, their core audience stopped venturing out to theaters. Now, one of Hollywood’s fresh strategies seems to involve branding or rebranding.

In an effort to meet the demands of activists, the awards race has upended itself with DEI guidelines and overly conscious voting and virtue signaling. One result has been woe unto embattled BAFTA. Now, a great number of people are wary of getting a message they will be forced to swallow when they innocently turn out to see a movie. For those inside the world of the Oscars it’s all fine and dandy as its speaks to their own reality. But to most people outside of it, they’re thinking — um, no thank you. I’ll just wait to watch it on streaming.

Ideally, the Oscars are about both the world inside the industry as well as the broader public outside. At the moment, film festivals remain our best guide for what will eventually define the Oscar race, as opposed to a movie owning the box office (Mission Impossible anyone?).

So here we are, on the brink of another Oscar season. On the page, Next Goal Wins looks to me like a strong contender. It will have its launch at TIFF, which is a good spot for it, but that means it won’t go to Telluride as the two fests continue to jealously battle it out for the Big Gets. I tend to take all reactions to movies from film festivals with a grain of salt. We humans tend to reflect what those around us think and say, and I’ve too-often been drawn in by a giddy festival reaction, and gotten it wrong in the long run.

Festival acclaim can also set a movie up for failure. Witness The Fabelmans and Belfast doing so well in festival season only to be undone in the last minutes due to other driving factors (like inclusivity — remember, we’re still in the “white guy scare” phase). Film festivals can set up THE FRONTRUNNER and the SCRAPPY UNDERDOG. When we take inclusivity out of it, we can look at 2012 for the best example of this. Zero Dark Thirty started out as the one to beat. Then it was toppled by controversy and THE FRONTRUNNER became Lincoln (the film that should have won). But Argo was the dark horse SCRAPPY UNDERDOG (to mix species metaphors) because Ben Affleck (along with Kathryn Bigelow) were both left off the Best Director list. That set into motion an astounding rounding of the bases by Argo and Affleck.

As much as I complained about that back then, I’d give my kingdom for a year like that one again. Argo was a pop culture movie too – it tapped into imagination of the general public at the same time that it was wowing awards voters. That was an organic Oscar race that seemed to be sort of rooted in the real world. But nowadays there seems to be an ongoing “hostage video” vibe, wherein everyone seems so afraid to simply vote for what they love, so that we’re frozen in place.  Awards voters pick the films they love — like Moonlight, Parasite and EEAAO. It’s just that they don’t also tend to reach outward into the shared consciousness as they used to do in the old days.

Either way, keep an eye out for the need to anoint some hapless movie as THE FRONTRUNNER just to watch it knocked off its perch by the SCRAPPY UNDERDOG as Oscar Night approaches. This is probably my least favorite thing about Oscar season.

Sight unseen, Next Goal Wins has SCRAPPY UNDERDOG written all over it, as sports film often do. It also promises to be charming and a film you can’t attack without looking like a jerk, which is usually gold for the Oscar race. But to do well, people have to see it coming while at the same time not see it coming. Aye, there’s the rub.

Here is the trailer for Next Goal Wins:

Our preview for Next Goal Wins is here.