Ah, it’s the most wonderful time of the year. Not the Christmas season… please don’t put those decorations out yet. It’s Awards Season.
The time that begins with a run of fall film festivals that trickles into the holiday Academy buzz that cascades into the January awards ceremonies. But hold up a second… let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s enjoy where we’re at for a moment.
This weekend brings the festival rush to Los Angeles again. Shortly after the Los Angeles Film Festival’s final run in September, AFI Fest settles in for another week in the center of Hollywood. It’s an event that brings the last rush of festival premieres stateside with a load of rare and hard-to-see international and independent cinema. It’s an enchanting little festival, and accessible to all — free tickets for any screening is a rare act of embrace toward cinephiles, cine-curious and cine-tourists alike. And for a film fan of any ilk, this is why it’s the most wonderful time of the film calendar. A good film is around every corner — whether it’s in the awards conversation or not.
To an Angelino who keeps an amateur horse in the Oscar race, AFI Fest can also be the eve of ‘Awards Time’ in the city of stars, with new films from Cuarón and the Coen Brothers revealing themselves to a West Coast audience. The American Film Institute has, again, pulled an impressive lineup together with early festival favorites Steve McQueen’s Widows, Yorgos Lanthimos’ The Favourite and Peter Farrelly’s Green Book among the headlining films. While these films have already cemented a strong leg in the race with small tours of the September festivals, a couple high profile world premieres are on the schedule as well.
On the Basis of Sex, courtesy of Focus Features
Opening night brings On the Basis of Sex, the story of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the festival with curiosity surrounding its place in the awards conversation. The same goes for the closing night film Mary Queen of Scots, starring two of last year’s lead actress nominees Margot Robbie and Saoirse Ronan. It’s easy to get caught up in the whirlwind of “will they or won’t they” with prestige players, especially at a major festival in the heart of the movieland. But a scan down the list of the AFI Opening Night films suggests that getting lost in speculation may not be as necessary as it seems.
Since 2000, only six of the AFI Fest opening night films have garnered at least one Oscar nomination. Only one movie has ever won (Walk the Line, 2005), and it was for a single award (Reese Witherspoon for Best Actress). The three to snag above-the-line nominations — O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and last year’s opener, Mudbound — debuted at Cannes, London, and Sundance respectively, thus already having goodwill in their pack. The rest comes from a similar breed. Since 2000, over half have been a true-story or biopic (The Soloist, J. Edgar, Hitchcock, Saving Mr. Banks to name a few), just under half directed by an actor (Antwone Fisher, Bobby, Lions for Lambs, By the Sea to name a few more) and all can be considered to some degree a “populist” movie. Something harmless that you can broadly recommend to your folks at the holidays when they ask what the big movies are this season. The opening night films have often been the “star-iest” of the festival, bringing out the big names that get the party going. But in the end, these films have mostly been non-starters — or, films with the names and the sheen but without the edge that critics and pundits look for.
Angelina Jolie on the red carpet for By The Sea. Courtesy of Bros 4 America
This isn’t to write-off this year’s opening film, On The Basis of Sex. It is an essential story of 20th century American progress directed by a woman (Mimi Leder) premiering in a town that still needs more stories told with the female voice. But all in all, it is a reminder to not get lost in the hype, which may have been one of the reasons why the Los Angeles Film Festival, put on by Film Independent, wilted. LAFF’s pivot from their usual summer slot to a fall slot got lost without a key awards release on the bill, despite having a program full of outstanding cinema from eclectic voices. The film festival economy should serve as discovery center for film-lovers, not a feeding station for the first look. The best films to find at a festival like AFI Fest are the little foreign needles in the Hollywood haystack.
If you’re heading to AFI Fest this week, listen to these off-the-radar stories just as you would a contender. The need to cultivate contemporary voices is more important than ever. Wander into a smaller theater, and hear another language you may not have heard before. See a new landscape you didn’t know existed. That is the real beauty of the Awards Season. It’s a time when the best of Hollywood comes out to play, so don’t count out the underdogs.
