The main nominations for the Academy Awards usually go to films that have previously appeared at the most prestigious film festivals. Most often, Oscar favorites premiere at six film festivals: Toronto (Canada), Cannes (France), Venice (Italy), Berlin (Germany), Telluride (USA) and Park City (Sundance, USA).
Film festival posters
However, the American Film Academy pays the most attention to the film forum in Toronto. It takes place in the fall, thus summing up the film year. It is here that American premieres of films that have previously received prizes at prestigious film festivals in Europe are organized. Also in Toronto are the first screenings of films that have a great chance of being nominated for an Oscar.
If a film wins a prize at the Toronto Film Festival, this significantly increases its chances of winning an Academy Award. For example, in 2019, the film “Green Book” triumphed at this Canadian film festival. And later she won the main statuette of the American Film Academy.
And in the early 2010s, Oscar’s favorite film festival was Cannes. Films from this film forum more often than from any other received nominations for the coveted statuettes of the American Film Academy and often even won. As the graph shows, in the 2010s, between three and eight films from the Cannes Film Festival entered the Oscar race each year:
Cannes films at the Oscars
For example, the films “Love” by Michael Haneke, “The Great Beauty” by Paolo Sorrentino, “Son of Saul” by Laszlo Nemes and “The Salesman” by Asghar Farhadi won Oscars for “Best Foreign Language Film”, and before that they received prizes at Cannes.
Films “Love”, “The Great Beauty”, “Son of Saul” and “The Salesman”
However, in recent years, films that opened the Venice Film Festival have begun to compete just as actively for Oscars. For example, two favorites of the 2018 American Film Academy, “The Shape of Water” by Guillermo Del Toro and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” by Martin McDonagh, opened in Venice. In 2019, this film forum also drew the attention of the Film Academy to a number of films. It was there that the premieres took place, for example, of Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Favourite, Damien Chazelle’s First Man and Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born. As a result, these films received a number of Oscar nominations and statuettes.
Films “Roma”, “The Favorite”, “First Man” and “A Star is Born”
This graph shows how many films from Cannes (red bars) and Venice (black bars) received Oscar nominations in the 2010s. If at the beginning of the decade seven films from Cannes and only two from Venice participated in the Oscar race, then in 2019 the Italian film festival opened more films to the American Film Academy than the French one.
Cannes and Venice films at the Oscars
At the same time, from the Berlinale, Sundance and Telluride during the 2010s, two or three films entered the Oscar race annually.
