These days the race for the Oscars starts in Venice, Italy. Of the past 10 best picture winners, four have premiered on the lagoon, including, most recently, Chloé Zhao's Nomadland in 2020. That film also took the festival's main prize, the Golden Lion, making it the second film after Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water (2017) to claim that double distinction.
This is a remarkable turnaround for a film festival, which opens Wednesday and runs through September 7, whose international standing was slipping in the early aughts. Much of the credit for this reversal of fortune goes to the festival's leader, Alberto Barbera. When Barbera's current term as artistic director began in 2012, the festival was struggling to attract films by Hollywood studios.
"It was much easier to go to Toronto to spend less money and to make a proper promotion for the domestic market," Barbera said, referring to the Toronto International Film Festival, which is held in early September. "But losing the presence of Hollywood studios was a big risk for Venice," he continued, adding that he feared a disastrous chain effect if major American studios turned their backs on his festival.
Barbera convinced the Venice Biennale, which runs the festival, to renovate screening rooms and facilities that had not been updated in decades. He also flew to Los Angeles twice a year to meet with the heads of studios and independent film companies to court them.
In his second summer on the job, Barbera's efforts bore fruit when the festival opened with Alfonso Cuarón's "Gravity," which starred George Clooney and Sandra Bullock.
"Warner Bros were not so sure that the film could be a commercial success," Barbera said. The film received rave reviews, went on to gross over $700 million and won Cuarón the Oscar for best director. It was exactly what Barbera had wanted. Since then, not a year has gone by without a major Oscar contender premiering at his festival, including blockbusters La La Land (2016), A Star Is Born (2018), Joker (2019) and Dune (2021) as well as indie hits Spotlight (2015) and Tár (2022).
One year after Gravity, the festival opened with Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Birdman, which went on to win the Oscar for best picture in 2015.
"That was when it really kind of kicked off as an Oscar launchpad," Guy Lodge, a film critic for Variety, said in a recent phone interview. According to him, Venice, which needed "a new injection of energy and a new identity," was uniquely poised to benefit from a mutual embrace of film festivals and award contenders that was, at the time, relatively new. (He noted that 2023's "Oppenheimer" was the first best picture winner that did not premiere at a North American or European festival since 2006's "The Departed.")
"I think distributors and award strategists and publicists started to realize that they had this very wide open launchpad for their kind of Oscar hopefuls at a point that wasn't too early and wasn't too late, and would give them enough time to kind of make a splash at Venice and then have enough time to kind of build over the next few months as summer went into autumn," he said.
Along with the big studio films, smaller titles have also benefited from being screened and crowned at Venice. Lodge pointed to Nomadland as a film that was likely helped along by the festival trophy. "If that film had launched at Sundance, for example, and it was much more of a Sundance-type film, I think it might not have sustained the course, as Venice really gave that film a kind of veneer of prestige," he said.
The festival's newfound stature has arguably made it especially resilient in the face of recent challenges and disruptions. The festival found a safe way to forge ahead with its 77th edition in 2020, six months after the outbreak of COVID. And last year, the festival presented a robust installment despite the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists strike. The 23-title main competition included work by Sofia Coppola, Ava DuVernay, Michael Mann and Yorgos Lanthimos, who won the Golden Lion for his surreal horror-fantasy film "Poor Things."
"We committed to a late-year release date in the US before we went to Venice with the hope that the strikes would have resolved by then," Ed Guiney, one of the film's producers, said in a phone interview from the set of Lanthimos' new film, "Bugonia," just outside London.
"That also worked out quite well for us because we got quite a lot of attention for the film at Venice because it won the Golden Lion and because it was well reviewed, etc., etc., even without any cast," Guiney said. "And so that gave it some good momentum, and it allowed it to build to the point where our cast was to join us for the American premiere."
"Poor Things" was Lanthimos' second consecutive feature to compete at Venice after The Favourite (2018), which had also been co-produced by Guiney's company, Element Pictures. After bagging the Golden Lion, Poor Things wound up winning four Oscars (out of 11 nominations) including best actress for Emma Stone, one of the dozens of stars who did not walk the red carpet at the festival because of the strike.
"I have a lot of respect for the filmmakers who didn't pull their films out because some of the stars couldn't be there," Laura Poitras, who won the Golden Lion in 2022 for her documentary "All the Beauty and the Bloodshed," and who served on last year's international jury, said in a phone interview.
"We were definitely in solidarity with the actors and the writers on strike," Poitras said. Even though the festival lineup remained mostly unaffected -- Luca Guadagnino's Challengers was the only major title dropped from the program -- Poitras maintained that "the impact of the strike was real."
"You felt that the actors weren't able to be celebrated," she said, singling out Stone, who both starred in and produced Poor Things, and whose absence at the premiere Poitras found "heartbreaking".
While acknowledging that the festival had become an awards-season feeder, Poitras said Venice "has also been a place for innovation and beautiful filmmaking," praising two films that also won top prizes in 2022: Alice Diop's Saint Omer and Jafar Panahi's No Bears.
Lodge said there was some initial worry that the festival's integrity would be compromised by the influx of big Hollywood productions. But during his tenure, Barbera has allayed that fear through "rigorous and quite adventurous programming of lesser-known titles," especially in the main competition slate.
While the current lineup includes some of this year's starriest films, including Joker: Folie à Deux, with Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga and Pedro Almodóvar's The Room Next Door, starring Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, Barbera eagerly points out that over half the competition films are by directors who are new to the festival. "There are a lot of surprises," he said.
Regardless of how many future Oscar nominees and winners might debut at the festival, Barbera said he was "particularly satisfied" with this year's program, which was assembled from over 4,000 submissions.
"The aim of a festival," Barbera said, "is to discover new talent, to explore the limits of contemporary cinema, new expressions and new voices."