Lies, Damned Lies and Festival Statistics

What do the multiple wins in Venice for Vera Drake and The Sea Within mean for their Oscar chances? Historically speaking, not much.

In the last ten years, the Venice Film Festival hasn’t overlapped much with the Academy. Only one Best Picture nominee (The Cider House Rules) has even been in the running for the top prize – The Golden Lion (which Vera Drake just won). The only other Best Picture nominee to receive any recognition there was Lost in Translation, which wasn’t nominated for the Golden Lion, but did pick up the Lina Mangiacapre Award last year.

There have been a few future Academy nominees in other categories that have earned preliminary recognition in Venice. Spike Jonze picked up a couple of awards for Being John Malkovich. Y tu mama tambien won Best Screenplay. Julianne Moore got her first recognition for her work in Far From Heaven there with a pair of Best Actress awards, and Edward Lachman received a special award for his cinematography in that same film [side note – what is an Academy Award nominated cinematographer doing shooting Carmen Electra’s Aerobic Striptease?]. And Naomi Watts and Benicio Del Toro were both honored for their Oscar-nominated turns in 21 Grams. Finally, this year’s Best Actor, Javier Bardem previously won his first award for his performance in Before Night Falls in Venice.

All in all, though, Venice’s value as an Oscar prognosticator is severely limited by the small number of high profile English language films that show in competition there. So while their wins may help Imelda Staunton and Bardem start to build some much-needed buzz going into awards season, they hardly guarantee nominations (however, if Bardem also scores in Toronto, he may cement his position as a lock). The films themselves still seem to be a long way from entering the Best Picture race.

The Toronto International Film Festival, on the other hand, has a pretty good track record with generating buzz (or at least noticing it first). Between 1996 and 2000, the festival tapped five future Best Picture nominees for top awards (Shine, L.A. Confidential, Life is Beautiful, American Beauty and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). In addition, films nominated for Best Directing Oscars received high honors in Toronto (The Sweet Hereafter, Billy Elliot and City of God), as did some other top-category Oscar contenders (Amelie, Bowling for Columbine, Whale Rider, The Barbarian Invasions).

With a number of high-profile prestige films in competition up North this year, the winners (both in terms of awards and critical reception) from Toronto will probably be bigger Academy players than their Venice counterparts.

As long as I’m examining superficial trends in festival outcomes as they relate to the Oscar race, let’s take a look at how Cannes Palme d’Or winners have fared at the Academy Awards.

Since 1949, 27 English-language films have won the top prize at the festival. Among those, nearly half (13) have gone on to be nominated for Best Picture (actually only 11 have gone on to be nominated, since Friendly Persuasion and All That Jazz were nominated for Oscars before their wins at Cannes). Half of the remaining 14 winners were nominated for Academy Awards other than Best Picture (six of them in the “major categories”), while the last seven received no Oscar love.

If there’s any science to this sort of thing, that’s good news for Fahrenheit 9/11.