The Long Game Begins on the Lido
By the time the boats drift toward the Palazzo del Cinema this week, Screen Daily's annual awards season preview reminds us that the race for the 99th Academy Awards is no longer about discovery — it is about choreography. We see, in the trade's careful mapping of Venice, Telluride and Toronto, a festival circuit repositioned as confirmation rather than coronation. What strikes us most is not which films arrive at the Lido first, but how the campaigns are reading one another across oceans.
A Launchpad with a Cautious Rhythm
Venise (September 2–12) opens with Danny Boyle's Ink, the Netflix pickup for the US and Latin America, while Searchlight's Wild Horse Nine from Martin McDonagh will screen both on the Lido and in Telluride (September 4–7). Jesse Eisenberg's The Debut, understood to be heading to A24's festival slate first at Telluride before its TIFF bow (September 10–20), rounds out a deliberately measured American-indie diaspora. These are films still seeking their oxygen, and the autumn festivals remain the place to find it.
The Heavyweights Who No Longer Need One
The complication, as Screen Daily rightly foregrounds, is the cohort of contenders arriving with their argument already made. Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey — the Homer adaptation that has grossed $1.5bn globally for Universal — sits atop the field as a critical darling from a writer-director whose Oppenheimer swept seven Oscars in 2024. Amazon MGM's Project Hail Mary from Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, starring Ryan Gosling, has cleared $683m worldwide since March, while Antoine Fuqua's Michael, the Lionsgate Jackson biopic, has danced past $1bn at the global box office. These are not campaigns auditioning for the room; they are campaigns arriving fully rehearsed.
What the Room Will Decide
With nominations due January 21, 2027 and the ceremony set for March 14, the questions now frame themselves in distinctly cinematic terms. Can The Odyssey's multi-category push overtake the 16 nominations Sinners claimed last season? Will Cannes breakouts La Bola Negra and Club Kid carry their Croisette momentum into voters' mailboxes? And will Penélope Cruz — anchoring Bunker, turning up in The Invite, and cameo-ing through La Bola Negra — make history with two nominations in the same category? Nolan's recent brokering of a new four-year Directors Guild contract, noted by Screen Daily, has only thickened the studio goodwill behind his auteur spectacle. The festivals will offer verdicts within weeks; the campaigns, we suspect, are already reading the room.