Venice Jump-starts Oscar Season
For a few hours this morning, Metacritic editors did not appear to be doing their jobs. Or maybe it was Owen Gleiberman and Sheri Linden, over at Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. When would the Ad Astra reviews come? The film had wrapped up its premiere at Venice Film Festival, Deadline had published a post-screening Q&A with Brad Pitt, and snippets of opinions had surfaced on Twitter. We may never know the reasons for the delay—I feared a review embargo, which would contradict Disney’s decision to give the film a festival premiere—but as of lunchtime, the James Gray sci-fi epic can claim a Metascore. And it’s good. Critics are bestowing Ad Astra with Kubrick and Malick comparisons, and ranking Pitt’s performance among his best. They did the same thing earlier this summer after seeing him in Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood.
Will Pitt net double nominations at the 2020 Academy Awards? I’m all for it—category fraud be damned!—because the guy has never won an acting trophy. Nor has Scarlett Johansson, who carries the title of “Golden Globe Nominee” in Netflix’s campaign for Marriage Story, which also opened today. Why did Netflix feel the need to qualify their lead actress’s performance when she’s already a household name? Maybe they’re signaling to the Academy. The streamer is certainly Oscar-hungry—perhaps hangry?—after a multimillion-dollar spend on Roma that failed to score that film a Best Picture win. In any case, Johansson walked away, or sailed or sped off in a water taxi, with high praise for her turn opposite Adam Driver in Noah Baumbach’s drama about the contentious divorce of an actress and a director. Driver and Johannson’s ultimate nominations are about as likely as tomorrow’s sunrise.
It’s generally a good sign when films with expected wide releases schedule stops at major festivals. That means confidence from the distributor, and (ideally) a long crescendo of a journey from warm critical reception to audience curiosity and high ticket sales. Venice is especially desirable this year, after a 2018 slate that launched three of the most nominated films at March’s Oscars ceremony (The Favourite, Roma and A Star Is Born).
The quality of Ad Astra was something of a question mark before today—20th Century Fox delayed the film’s release from January 11 to May 24, before Disney swallowed the studio and decided it needed time to craft better publicity. (The film now goes wide in just over two weeks.) Such delays often indicate conflict between creatives and upper management, but Gray told the Los Angeles Times that the reshoots and reedits did not constitute “change”: “I see [the film] as evolved.”
Marriage Story faces no box office uncertainty—Netflix is giving the film a platform release so that it meets the Academy’s qualification requirements, but will not likely disclose grosses—though Ad Astra carries an $80 million price tag and aligns thematically with First Man, a Venice favorite that sputtered in the multiplexes. Recent tracking puts Astra’s opening weekend under $20 million, but, depending on how the general public reacts, the film could stick around. Brad Pitt still carries movie star status, after all, and he’s currently basking in Tarantino glow.
The air has cleared, then, around two high-profile American pictures, but the list of big names left to show off new projects is overwhelming. And it seems that everyone is rushing to get out ahead, with dwindling premieres left for festivals like Toronto (which has The Goldfinch) and New York (which has The Irishman). On Saturday, Venice will screen Joker, the much-anticipated comic-book origin story starring Joaquin Phoenix. Warner Bros. clearly hopes to position the film as both an awards player and a Dark Knight successor, angling for some mix between the demographics that favored It and Deadpool. Phillips apparently spent a year convincing Warner executives to allow an R rating.
The ubiquity of Big Little Lies is reflected in the numerous offerings from its cast members. Laura Dern costars in Marriage Story, and Meryl Streep heads Steven Soderbergh’s The Laundromat, a dramatization of the Panama Papers scandal, alongside Gary Oldman. Streep and Dern are both eagerly awaited in Little Women, which Greta Gerwig directed, and which, as far as I can tell, is foregoing the festival route, probably because its box office prospects are promising; stronger anticipation begets a better run. Sadly, we must wait until Christmas for that film, but not so long to see another one of its stars, Timothée Chalamet, who lined up Netflix period piece The King for Venice. Johnny Depp might be preparing his renaissance with Waiting for the Barbarians, and Penélope Cruz is following up on Pedro Almodóvar’s Cannes hit Pain and Glory with Wasp Network, from French auteur Oliver Assayas (Edgar Ramirez and Gael García Bernal costar). Roman Polanski also emerges from exile for the controversial premiere of An Officer and a Spy, his first directorial effort in two years, though the film’s producers nearly canceled the screening when jury president Lucrecia Martel stated that she would “not congratulate” the director if the film were to win prizes. The Hollywood Reporter called Venice the “F-You Film Festival” last week, citing decisions like these, which fly in the face of the #MeToo movement, and generate negative headlines, but which perhaps are designed to do so.
The implications of competing against a convicted rapist have not deterred industry big-shots and celebrities from turning out en masse for the almost absurd fantasy that comprises the Venice aesthetic. And who can blame them, really? Yes, Cannes is pretty, but that festival, and New York and Toronto and mountain-chic Telluride cannot produce the exhilaration I know I would feel riding around on waterways and spotting famous people every other block—can we call them blocks?—and dipping in and out of historic palazzos and basking in the late August sunlight and worrying that my film’s survival depends not on rich people watching it in a coastal Italian city but bland middle-aged couples soaking it up back home, and then getting drunk and forgetting until the morning. I can only hope that such a predicament might befall me in the future. For now, the festival plays out on screens and through digital windows, and heralds in the hundreds of windows and screens and videos that will define the fall Oscar season, which has begun.
Fergus Campbell is a Culture writer & sophomore in Columbia College.
