Awards & Festivals
Awards and festivals treated as a campaign beat: strategy, precursor maths, voting bodies and money, from first screening to final ballot.
The Academy's first change to how films reach the international feature Oscar in seventy years let in Yellow Letters, Shame and Money and Angh. The other three festival winners were going to be there anyway. Submissions closed on 30 September.
Romania has submitted 42 films to the international feature Oscar since 1966 and been nominated once. Entries close on Wednesday, and Fjord is going in without the corrective the Academy built for Mungiu's last Palme d'Or.
Add up the cash on the festival's own 2025 prize lists and it comes to $597,500, decided in a single week in Al-Balad. The Red Sea Film Foundation has cancelled this December's edition and will not return until Q4 2027.
Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi's Spanish-language epic took the People's Choice Award on Sunday. The award has picked five eventual best picture winners since 2008 and missed twice, once on the only non-English film it has ever chosen. Netflix has twelve best picture nominations and no wins.
France's committee picked a Russian-language film over four French ones. It is the third year running that the country's Oscar entry has not been in French, and the 34th submission since France last won the category.
The Odyssey is the twelfth highest-grossing film ever made. If it wins Best Picture on 14 March 2027 it becomes the third billion-dollar winner in Academy history, and the second-biggest of them, $537m ahead of The Return of the King.
The Pitt and Hacks arrived at the 78th Emmys with 49 nominations between them and left with eight awards. Widow's Bay arrived with 19 and left with 14, a conversion rate four and a half times better and a new record for a comedy series.
The 78th Primetime Emmys hand out prizes on Monday at the Peacock Theater. A hospital drama leads with 25 nominations, and the host is the first non-comedian in more than three decades.
NAZA drew 24.5 minutes of applause, Wild Horse Nine got 13 and left John Malkovich in tears, and Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love has the best reviews of the festival. The jury decides at 19:00 Rome time.
Searchlight opens Wild Horse Nine on 6 November. After Venice and a Telluride medallion, John Malkovich has an awards campaign whether or not anyone has announced one.
TIFF has spent years resisting a formal market. It launches one today, into a calendar that already has Cannes and the AFM, and the sellers arriving are not certain what they are arriving for.