Lessons From Toronto: A Skimpy Year for Movies Leaves a Wide Open Awards Race | Analysis

With its huge lineup of hundreds of movies, the Toronto International Film Festival is the best place for films that will figure in the awards race that kicks off with a vengeance after the back-to-back blast of the Venice, Telluride and Toronto festivals. But is TIFF 2024 the best place to discover new entries into that race? Based on the first four days of this year’s festival, probably not.

This year has seen a lot of satisfying crowd-pleasers, ranging from the opening night film “Nutcrackers” to “The Last Showgirl,” “All of You,” “The Cut,” “Unstoppable,” “The Life of Chuck” and “The Fire Inside.” But if you’re looking for the world premiere of a clear Best Picture contender, it’s hard to go much further than “Hard Truths,” the quietly wrenching new film from British master Mike Leigh.

Something similar happened last year, when Cord Jefferson’s “American Fiction” was the only real awards breakout from among the TIFF world premieres. And this year’s crop of first-weekend films has some contenders that could make some noise if things go well for them.

But is John Crowley’s “We Live in Time” a real Best Picture contender, or just a TIFF People’s Choice Award contender? It was wildly popular with the audience at the Princess of Wales Theatre on Friday night, and its romance between Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield was a hit with most critics, but it’s a more questionable awards film than, say, “American Fiction” was when it came out of a similar time slot last year.

Ron Howard’s crazy but true story “Eden” may be a jaw-dropping drama about a group of people trying to build a life in the Galápagos Islands after World War I, but TheWrap was among those who called it “solid yet darkly silly.” Silliness is a tough commodity for voters.

Amy Adams is amazing in Marielle Heller’s “Nightbitch,” but will Academy members go for a movie whose tagline is “Motherhood is a bitch”?

Maybe there’s something in the air in this divisive, dark time; maybe filmmakers are gravitating toward lighter material coming out of the pandemic and the Hollywood strikes and global unrest and a slumping movie business. Maybe audience films are what we need to be looking for these days, even at film festivals that are often heavy on awards-bait titles.

Heck, maybe audience films are better than awards-bait titles, period. Or maybe what we really need is a smorgasbord of titles big and small, that doesn’t concern itself too much with what small groups of voters may think in a couple of months.

After all, TIFF is a something-for-everybody kind of place: eye-opening and occasionally jaw-dropping documentaries like “Men of War” and “From Ground Zero,” rousing music docs like “Elton John: Never Too Late,” “Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band” and the Pharrell Williams Lego doc “Piece by Piece,” animated gems like “Flow” and “The Wild Robot,” thrillers like “Relay” and “Cloud,” indie dramas like “Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight,” epics like “William Tell,” intimate character studies like “On Swift Horses” and challenging work like “The End” and “April.”

But among this year’s fall festivals, Venice premiered Pedro Almodovar’s “The Room Next Door,” Pablo Larrain’s “Maria,” Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist” and Luca Guadagnino’s “Queer,” among others, while Telluride added Edward Berger’s “Conclave,” Jason Reitman’s “Saturday Night,” Malcolm Washington’s “The Piano Lesson” and RaMell Ross’ “The Nickel Boys.”

Chances are that the eventual Best Picture slate will include at least four films from that list.

Toronto still has the advantage of volume: Its audiences can see all of those films except “Maria” and “The Nickel Boys,” and they’re also getting “Emilia Perez” and “Anora” from Cannes, among many others. A good chunk of nominees will no doubt end up being TIFF movies, but they won’t have been discovered at TIFF or launched at TIFF.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing — creating a festival that showcases the best for a local audience of fans was once the festival’s mission — but at a time when the industry looks to the fall festivals to set the awards agenda, Toronto has been in an odd position for the last couple of years.

TIFF 2024 is stirring up conversations, to be sure, as any festival that includes challenging work like “Pedro Paramo,” “The Substance,” “The Assessment” and “Megalopolis” will do. But this year, at least so far, it’s not driving the conversations that will help launch awards season.

Chase Hutchinson contributed to this report.

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