The Oscar Race Enters Its Next Phase

There is a point every Oscar season when prediction becomes evidence. For most of the year, the race is assembled from names, release dates, trailers, studio reputations, old voting patterns, and the kind of educated guessing that can make an unseen movie feel inevitable. Then September arrives. A theater fills. The lights go down. A film that has lived for six months as a title on an awards chart becomes an actual experience shared by a few hundred people, and by the time those people reach the lobby, the season has changed.

That transition begins now. The 83rd Venice International Film Festival opens September 2 and runs through September 12. Telluride follows from September 4 through 7, preserving its annual ritual of withholding the full lineup until almost the moment audiences arrive in Colorado. Toronto begins September 10. By the end of that stretch, the 2027 Oscar race will still be uncertain, but it will no longer be theoretical in the same way. We will have cheers, walkouts, reviews, standing ovations of dubious statistical value, performances that suddenly feel undeniable, and expensive campaigns forced to decide whether their first week was a launch or damage control.

The unusual part of this year is that the fall is not starting from zero. Two of the most credible Best Picture contenders have already had the kind of public life that many prestige films spend the entire season trying to manufacture. Project Hail Mary arrived in March as a large, accessible science-fiction movie with Ryan Gosling at its center and immediately became more than an early-year placeholder. Then Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey turned midsummer into an awards event. Its scale, reception, technical achievement, and extraordinary theatrical run did something that matters in the preferential-ballot era: they created a broad constituency long before the first festival badge was printed.

At TSR, The Odyssey currently sits at the top of our ballot, and the logic is not difficult to understand. Nolan is no longer campaigning for the industry to acknowledge him as one of its central filmmakers; Oppenheimer settled that question. The more interesting issue is whether voters will see The Odyssey as another culmination rather than simply the film after the culmination. The movie has the obvious below-the-line strength, but its strongest argument may be cultural. It gave audiences a reason to seek out a particular kind of screen, format, and communal experience. Oscar campaigns love to describe films as events. The Odyssey did not need a campaign to tell people that it was one.

That does not make it safe. Early frontrunners are dangerous positions precisely because every new discovery gets measured against them. A film can spend months collecting admiration while an unseen contender has the luxury of collecting imagination. Venice begins the process of replacing imagination with evidence. Danny Boyle’s Ink opens the festival, while the competition includes films from filmmakers such as Martin McDonagh, Werner Herzog, Hirokazu Kore-eda, and Lee Chang-dong. Some will vanish from the awards conversation almost immediately. One or two may become the films everyone is suddenly rearranging their charts to accommodate.

The festival system itself is also changing. Venice remains one of the most powerful awards launchpads in the world, but its 2026 slate is noticeably less saturated with giant studio premieres than some recent editions. That is not necessarily a sign of weakness. It is evidence that studios have become more selective about the risk of an early unveiling. A festival can provide months of momentum, but it can also turn a film that once had unlimited potential into a defined product before its marketing campaign is ready to respond. In an era when the first reactions leave the room before the filmmakers do, secrecy has value.

Project Hail Mary offers the opposite model. It has already survived the conversion from anticipation to reality. The film no longer needs critics to explain what it might be; audiences have seen it, Ryan Gosling’s performance has established an emotional center, and the crafts can be evaluated rather than imagined. The challenge is memory. A March release has to remain vivid while Venice, Telluride, Toronto, and the late-year studio films create the intoxicating impression that the newest discovery must also be the most important one. Awards history is full of spring and summer films that were “locked” until the room became crowded.

That is why the next month matters less as a coronation than as a stress test. The Odyssey and Project Hail Mary have already proven they can withstand public exposure. The films arriving now have to prove they deserve to be mentioned alongside them. Primetime is one of the most intriguing because its premise sounds at once ludicrous, timely, and potentially potent: documentary filmmaker Lance Oppenheim makes his narrative feature debut with Robert Pattinson playing Chris Hansen during the rise of To Catch a Predator. A24 releases the film September 25, but Venice will tell us first whether the transformation is a fascinating performance, a sharp media autopsy, a stunt, or some combination of the three.

Pattinson is at an interesting point in his career. He has spent more than a decade using the freedom created by franchise celebrity to work with filmmakers who make audiences reconsider what kind of actor he is, and a role built around an instantly recognizable television persona could become the next phase of that project. But awards conversations often flatten unusual work into categories before the film has had a chance to define itself. Primetime may be an acting play. It may be a directing story. It may be too abrasive, too strange, or too culturally specific to move beyond critics and younger voters. At the moment, all of those possibilities are equally convenient because almost nobody has seen it.

Wild Horse Nine arrives with a more traditional awards profile. Martin McDonagh’s last two films, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri and The Banshees of Inisherin, combined for a mountain of nominations, and actors clearly respond to the rhythms of his writing. The new film reunites him with Sam Rockwell and places John Malkovich beside him in a dark story involving CIA officers on Easter Island in the 1970s. On paper, that is almost too easy to predict: screenplay, performances, perhaps Picture and Director if the whole thing catches. On September 3, paper stops mattering.

The same principle applies beyond Venice. Telluride’s secrecy makes it uniquely good at creating the illusion of sudden discovery, and Toronto’s public audience can give a contender something neither Venice critics nor pundit charts can manufacture: visible affection at scale. The People’s Choice Award is not an Oscar oracle, but Toronto has repeatedly shown how quickly enthusiasm can clarify a film’s path. A prestige drama that seemed difficult can suddenly look accessible. A star vehicle can become a performance campaign. A presumed heavyweight can discover that respect is not the same thing as love.

And then there are the contenders skipping the traditional festival launch altogether. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Digger opens October 2 with Tom Cruise playing a powerful oil tycoon behind extensive prosthetics. Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Reckoning arrives October 9, returning to the world of Facebook without David Fincher and with Jeremy Strong stepping into the role of Mark Zuckerberg. Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three waits until December 18, late enough to enter the race with almost no margin for recalibration. Those films do not need Venice to matter. Their absence is part of the story of this season: the festival circuit is still central, but it no longer controls every path to relevance.

That makes the temptation to declare the race “over” after one ecstatic premiere even more misleading than usual. The Academy is not a festival jury. It is a huge, international body voting months from now after guild screenings, critics’ prizes, box office narratives, campaign events, controversies, and the simple accumulation of time have reshaped first impressions. A Venice sensation can become a permanent fixture. It can also become the film everyone admired in September and stopped talking about in January.

What September gives us is not certainty. It gives us hierarchy. We begin to learn which performances people want to keep discussing, which films inspire advocacy rather than polite approval, which directors have made work that feels connected to the moment, and which contenders contain enough craft strength to survive even if the top-line campaign softens. The best awards seasons are not the ones where pundits guessed correctly in August. They are the ones where the movies force the guesses to change.

For now, The Odyssey has the cleanest position. It is a critical and commercial achievement from a filmmaker whose relationship with the Academy has already moved from overdue recognition to institutional respect. Project Hail Mary remains the spring blockbuster with the strongest ability to hang around. But the empty spaces below them are about to fill quickly, and some of the films we have spent months describing as “contenders” are about to become something much more useful: movies we can argue about.

The race does not really begin when the first prediction chart goes online. It begins when there is something on the screen capable of proving the chart wrong.