The battle to win over Academy Awards voters played out at fancy parties and splashy premieres at international film festivals in Venice, Toronto and Telluride.

The 97th Academy Awards are months away, but the race is already on. This fall stands in contrast to last year’s empty red carpets – due to the Hollywood writers and actors’ strikes – as studios launch their biggest awards contenders, while also scrambling to remind voters of splashy titles that debuted earlier in the year.

The latest challengers screened in recent weeks at international film festivals in Venice and Toronto (TIFF), where Washington Post reporters were on the ground. Without a Barbenheimer juggernaut sucking up all the oxygen, it feels like this year’s race is so up in the air that no one knows which big-budget studio fare or indie darlings might make the cut for up to 10 best picture slots.

In Europe, early favourites such as Pedro Almodóvar’s droll euthanasia drama The Room Next Door, which casts Tilda Swinton opposite Julianne Moore, and Pablo Larraín’s Maria, a biopic starring Angelina Jolie as opera singer Maria Callas, met with comically long standing ovations. Almodóvar’s movie, which won the Golden Lion, was greeted with such a warm reception that the director ran around the theatre at its premiere, kissing and hugging attendees. In Canada, films that debuted in May at the Cannes Film Festival – including Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner Anora and Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez, which won the third-place Jury Prize and a special award for its quartet of actresses – gained many fans.

But it was American director Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck that pulled off a surprise win for TIFF’s coveted People’s Choice Award on Sunday. An adaptation of a Stephen King novella, it’s an apocalyptic parable on the meaning of life, told in reverse chronological order, starring Tom Hiddleston and featuring a great dance sequence, a mysterious attic and Nick Offerman narration that evokes one of King’s most beloved movie adaptations, Stand By Me. Could it be in Oscar contention? Twelve of the past 14 People’s Choice winners got best picture nominations – including last year’s winner, American Fiction – and four of them (The King’s Speech, 12 Years a Slave, Green Book and Nomadland) went on to win the Oscar.

As in any battle royal, dark horses continue to emerge. September 5, which dramatises ABC’s coverage of the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist attack, vaulted to the top of critics’ lists in Venice and Telluride and just sold to Paramount for a November 27 release. Nickel Boys, an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-winning novel, also made its buzzy debut (to mixed reviews) at Telluride. And Oscars prognosticators are still awaiting Steve McQueen’s historical drama Blitz, which premieres in October at the end of the New York Film Festival, as well as studio tentpoles such as Wicked, Nosferatu and Gladiator II, which will hit theatres in the final months of the year.

Here’s where things stand in a few of the top Oscars races.

Best picture

Anora is about a young Brooklyn sex worker who elopes with the son of a Russian oligarch. Photo / @neonrated Instagram

Riding high:

At Toronto, you could sense how bullish a studio was about promoting a movie by the size of its premiere party. Sean Baker’s Anora, about a young Brooklyn sex worker who elopes with the son of a Russian oligarch, had free-flowing Don Julio 1942 tequila and a dental station for partygoers to get rhinestones on their teeth – courtesy of distributor Neon. An exhilarating dismantling of the American Dream, it’s still a front-runner months after Greta Gerwig’s Cannes jury made the “heart-forward” decision to give it the top prize.

Meanwhile, Netflix sunk significant promotional funds into lavish Nobu sushi boats to celebrate Jacques Audiard’s mostly Spanish-language musical Emilia Pérez, which follows a Mexican cartel leader who undergoes gender-affirming surgery. The gritty, telenovela-style romp – which stars Zoe Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Karla Sofía Gascón – showed at TIFF at least nine times, largely to ecstatic, sold-out audiences. It was second in TIFF’s People’s Choice contest, while Anora was third (with far fewer screenings).

The breakout of Toronto and Telluride was undoubtedly Conclave, a thrilling – and at times, funny – take on the process of electing a new pope, from German-Austrian director Edward Berger, whose All Quiet on the Western Front won three Oscars in 2023. It plays out like a pulpy, Dan Brown genre flick, with a sly twist. After its TIFF premiere, a man walking out of the theatre exclaimed, “That’s going to win a ton of Oscars!”

The gripping September 5 was a quiet hit at Venice that grew into a monster Oscar contender at Telluride. From Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum, starring Peter Sarsgaard and John Magaro, it’s this year’s Spotlight, taking us inside the control room as ABC News sports broadcasters navigate suddenly covering a terrorist attack instead of swimming. But a historical re-creation of an event in which Palestinian extremists attacked Israeli athletes could make for the trickiest awards campaign of the year.

Following its win at Venice, Toronto also solidified the Oscar potential of The Room Next Door, Almodóvar’s triumphant film about two friends who reconnect after one receives a daunting medical diagnosis. Moore and Swinton anchor the 74-year-old Spanish director’s first English-language film.

And cinephiles went wild for Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, a sweeping 3½-hour epic about a Hungarian Jewish modernist architect (Adrien Brody) who survives the Holocaust. A24 snatched it up in Venice, where the premiere audience actually counted down the end of intermission (of course there’s an intermission!), they were that excited to see the second half.

On the bubble:

Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, which tracks – in real-time – 90 minutes of chaos before the 1975 series premiere of Saturday Night Live, got a rousing reception in Toronto and could land the best picture slot often reserved for the year’s crowd-pleaser. But it can get tedious for those who aren’t huge fans of SNL. Some reviewers felt the film, led by a fictional rendering of young Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle), relied too heavily on nostalgia and gymnastic cinematography to offer novel insight.

Halina Reijn’s Babygirl received strong reviews out of Venice and Toronto, with special attention to its lead performance by Nicole Kidman as a tech executive who begins a kinky sexual affair with an intern (Harris Dickinson). As the Academy has diversified in recent years, it also seems to have gotten less prudish (see: Poor Things). But this movie’s fate might rely more on the campaign tactics of distributor A24, which has been marketing the film as an erotic thriller even though it plays as more of a cheeky drama.

Both qualitatively and quantitatively (given strike-induced Hollywood setbacks), there should be room at the top for a couple of global stunners, including All We Imagine As Light, the Cannes Grand Prix winner that tells the gently profound story of the friendship formed by three working women in Mumbai. The film with the strongest breakout prospects appears to be The Seed of the Sacred Fig, Mohammad Rasoulof’s gripping exploration of an Iranian family’s life amid nationwide political protests. Rasoulof fled Iran to show the film at Cannes – a narrative that could propel his movie out of the international feature category and into Best Picture. The same goes for Hard Truths, the latest meditation on the human condition from writer-director Mike Leigh (Happy-Go-Lucky, Another Year), with a thunderous lead performance by Marianne Jean-Baptiste.

Not even Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn could save Joker: Folie à Deux. Photo / Warner Bros

Stumbling:

The biggest disappointment out of Venice might have been Joker: Folie à Deux, the follow-up to Todd Phillips’s Oscar-nominated 2019 villain origin story. The musical, set in a mental institution, follows Joaquin Phoenix’s title character as he croaks out the song-and-dance numbers that swirl in his head. Not even Lady Gaga as Harley Quinn could save the film that critics decried as “a slog” and “bad on purpose”.

In Toronto, Nightbitch failed to meet the high expectations placed on Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s novel about a stay-at-home mum who imagines she is turning into a dog. Amy Adams delivers a typically passionate performance, but some critics wanted a deeper exploration of the societal pressures on mothers – the Hollywood Reporter pronounced the adaptation “defanged”.

The Canadian festival also trampled on the hopes of Megalopolis, Francis Ford Coppola’s self-financed, US$120 million (NZ$193.66m) futuristic fable about the battle between art and greed. The Adam Driver-led film leaned into its bizarreness, including deadly golden arrows, a MAGA parable and a newscaster named Wow Platinum. One review summed it up: “What the hell did I just watch?”

Queer is a Luca Guadagnino film based on William S. Burroughs’s novel. Photo / A24

Best actor

Ralph Fiennes has generated considerable buzz for his measured performance in Conclave as Cardinal Lawrence, tasked with leading the selection of a new pope. Meanwhile, Daniel Craig’s deeply inhaled portrait of an American expat living in post-World War II Mexico City is driving most of the praise for Queer, the Luca Guadagnino film based on William S. Burroughs’s novel.

Colman Domingo’s chances of winning for Sing Sing, an emotional crowd-pleaser about a prison theatre programme in which Domingo acts among a cast of formerly incarcerated actors, could be at stake now that A24 has picked up The Brutalist, for which Brody is getting his best reviews since he won an Oscar (The Pianist) 22 years ago. He’s the shiny new object for the studio, which has struggled previously to juggle multiple awards campaigns. Sebastian Stan, too, has vaulted into the race with his portrayal of a young Donald Trump in The Apprentice, which premiered at Cannes and was freed from a lengthy legal battle just in time to screen at Telluride (and host private screenings outside the official festival in Toronto).

Given the poor reception of Joker: Folie à Deux, Phoenix’s chances for a repeat Oscar look bleaker than a Gotham City alleyway.

Best actress

No one came away from the fall festivals with a clearer path to an Oscar than Jolie, who learned how to sing opera and speak Italian for her towering – while also sad and lonely – portrayal of opera singer Maria Callas in the last week of her life. Maria is the final entry in Larráin’s poignant trilogy of films about the private lives of mega-famous women (see also: Jackie and Spencer), and Jolie will likely follow predecessors Natalie Portman and Kristen Stewart in landing an Oscar nomination.

Kidman also rocketed out of Venice, where she won the best actress prize for her vulnerable, funny and often naked turn in Babygirl. Demi Moore, too, bares everything for her outrageous body-horror film The Substance (winner of TIFF’s Midnight Madness award) in which she plays an older actress – pushed out of a job – who will do anything to be young again. Anora breakout Mikey Madison, an unforgettable force of nature as the title character, seems like a lock.

This is the tightest race of the acting categories, and the real tension will be in seeing which worthy actress doesn’t make the cut. Could it be Gascón, the cartel leader turned doyenne of Emilia Pérez, who would make history as the first openly-trans actress nominated? Or Saoirse Ronan, who’s competing against herself with big roles in Blitz and The Outrun. Amy Adams’s chances of yet another nomination took a hit with Nightbitch’s mixed reviews, but a fierce campaign could always turn things around.

The Academy’s huge acting branch often dishes up surprises in the form of well-regarded performances in global films. Two that impressed festivalgoers were Jean-Baptiste’s depressed, disgruntled, sometimes comically snarling Brit in Hard Truths and Fernanda Torres as the sturdy matriarch who finds a way forward after her husband is disappeared by Brazil’s 1970s military dictatorship in Walter Salles’s intimate adaptation of Marcelo Rubens Paiva’s memoir, I’m Still Here.

Jeremy Strong managed to make the audience feel sorry for notorious Machiavellian fixer Roy Cohn in The Apprentice.

Best supporting actor

For so long, it seemed like the once-crackling talent of Guy Pearce would be forever relegated to playing detectives or bad guys in Australian B-movies. As the thundering, slimy millionaire who commissions a gigantic arts centre on a hill in The Brutalist, he seems poised for a comeback.

As at Cannes, audiences in Telluride marvelled at how Jeremy Strong managed to make them feel sorry for notorious Machiavellian fixer Roy Cohn in The Apprentice. And at Toronto, critics speculated about whether any of the terrific men swirling around Madison’s lead in Anora might land nominations. Yura Borisov, as a Russian thug with hidden depths, and newcomer Mark Eidelshtein, who gives a fearless, physical performance as the title character’s immature fiancé, could both sneak in. Expect Kieran Culkin to also be in the mix for playing a nihilist out to discover his Jewish roots in the Sundance hit A Real Pain, along with Clarence Maclin, the formerly incarcerated actor at the heart of Sing Sing, and George MacKay playing the sheltered son of Tilda Swinton and Michael Shannon in Joshua Oppenheimer’s wacky apocalyptic musical, The End.

Best supporting actress

Emilia Pérez has been praised for its strong actresses across the board, so Netflix will have to be savvy with the awards campaign. While Selena Gomez was a huge reason fans flocked to watch the film in Toronto, Zoe Saldaña stunned critics with singing and dancing that reminded viewers what a powerhouse she can be, even when she isn’t painted blue or green. As some have pointed out, though, she has more screen time in the movie than Gascón, which could fuel arguments that she should be in the lead actress race.

The Room Next Door similarly boasts masterful performances from Moore and Swinton, the latter of whom is particularly well-suited for Almodóvar’s manicured melodrama and could edge out her co-star (provided they both run for a supporting actress slot). Swinton delivers Almodóvar’s dialogue with ease, an accomplishment some critics singled out in their reviews.

Or could this be Danielle Deadwyler’s year? She has plenty of fans who think she was robbed when she didn’t even get a nomination for her performance in 2022′s Till. And now she’s the standout of The Piano Lesson, an adaptation of August Wilson’s play, in a soul-baring performance as a woman whose house is haunted by the ghosts of wronged African Americans. Never count out the weight of Netflix, which brought the film to Toronto after its Telluride premiere.

You might also leave room for an unknown newcomer: One of the best things about actress Embeth Davidtz’s excellent adaptation of Alexandra Fuller’s 2001 memoir, Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, is Lexi Venter as an 8-year-old navigating the collapse of White colonial rule in Rhodesia. Venter’s feral performance summons Tatum O’Neal’s Oscar-winning turn in 1973′s Paper Moon, which could put her in the conversation if enough people see it.

Best documentary feature

The biggest wild card in this category is Will & Harper, in which Will Ferrell takes a road trip across America with his friend Harper Steele, a former SNL head writer who’d recently transitioned to being a woman. Poignantly funny, it got huge, teary standing ovations at TIFF and starts streaming on Netflix on September 27. The notoriously hard-to-crack documentary branch frequently favours issues documentaries over those about celebrities – but what will it do with this gem, which counts as both?

Another hard-to-categorise TIFF hit was Piece by Piece, a collaboration between Pharrell Williams and director Morgan Neville that tells the superstar musician’s life story through Lego animation. The warm, mesmerising documentary features many cameos (Jay-Z, Missy Elliott) and got a standing ovation at TIFF that was quickly deflated when a PETA activist got onstage to protest Williams’ use of fur as a fashion designer at Louis Vuitton. The film may actually have a better chance in the animated feature category.

In a field full of political docs, festival standouts include The Last Republican, about Rep. Adam Kinzinger’s last 14 months in office after defying President Trump; Errol Morris’s Separated, about Trump’s border policy; and the powerful No Other Land, made by a collective of Palestinian-Israeli activists. At Telluride, Zurawski v Texas, about the devastating effects of antiabortion laws in the state was a breakout, and then there’s Russians at War, an antiwar film that embeds with Russian troops on the front line in Ukraine, which screened in Venice but was pulled from TIFF before its North American premiere because of threats to the venue and festival staff.

Best animated feature

Chris Sanders’s The Wild Robot earned glowing reviews in Toronto. Though it will likely run against Inside Out 2, which dominated the box office earlier this year, Wild Robot taps into adoration for the children’s book upon which it is based. Set in a futuristic realm, the DreamWorks film follows a robot who is shipwrecked on a tropical island and becomes the adoptive parent of an orphaned gosling. It’s bolstered by a strong vocal performance from Lupita Nyong’o.