Venice vs. Cannes: Who’s Winning the Festival Fight for Oscar Supremacy?

After losing last year’s Oscar race to Cannes, Venice has come roaring back in 2025 with a lineup and positioning that many industry insiders say has put it firmly back in the driver’s seat for the fall awards season. While Cannes took Anora, Emilia Pérez and Flow — all of which went on to score major Oscar nominations and wins, with Anora racking up five nods, including best picture — Venice, whose 2024 edition can still boast about Brady Corbet’s triple Oscar winner The Brutalist, has reclaimed its reputation as the place where the season’s biggest contenders first touch down.

This year’s Venice slate is jam-packed with award hopefuls, including A24’s The Smashing Machine, Benny Safdie’s wrestling drama starring Dwayne Johnson in his first major dramatic role; Luca Guadagnino’s #MeToo-themed thriller After the Hunt, starring Julia Roberts, which will be Amazon MGM’s major award contender; and a triple play by Netflix (back again after skipping the Lido last year) of the horror adaptation Frankenstein, starring Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi and Mia Goth, from best picture winner Guillermo del Toro; the political thriller A House of Dynamite, with Idris Elba and Rebecca Ferguson from best picture winner Kathryn Bigelow; and the coming-of-age dramedy Jay Kelly, starring George Clooney, from four-time Oscar nominee Noah Baumbach. 

The Venice awards bench goes deep this year with such potential award breakouts as The Testament of Ann Lee, from The Brutalist producer and co-writer Mona Fastvold; Julian Schnabel’s art-themed crime story In the Hand of Dante, with Oscar Isaac in a dual role; Bugonia, the latest Yorgos Lanthimos-Emma Stone team-up; and Olivier Assayas’ The Wizard of the Kremlin, a timely political thriller featuring Jude Law as Vladimir Putin and Paul Dano as his unlikely adviser. Add in documentary highlights — Werner Herzog’s Ghost Elephants, Laura Poitras and Mark Obenhaus’ Cover-up and Gianfranco Rosi’s Below the Clouds — and international feature contenders, including Paolo Sorrentino’s La Grazia, Venice’s opening night film; Orphan from Hungary’s László Nemes; and No Other Choice, from acclaimed South Korean auteur Park Chan-wook, and you have the makings of a Venice-to-Oscar sweep. 

Not that Cannes’ lineup was all that shabby. Joachim Trier’s Grand Prix winner Sentimental Value, starring Renate Reinsve, Stellan Skarsgård and Elle Fanning, looks like a lock for a best picture nomination. Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or winner, It Was Just an Accident, and Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent (best actor/best director) are strong international feature contenders and could figure in multiple categories.

But when it comes to the fall festival circuit, Venice enters the season as the clear awards frontrunner. Toronto only has a handful of awards-focused world premieres this year, including the Sydney Sweeney boxing biopic Christy and Nia DaCosta’s Hedda, an adaptation of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, starring Tessa Thompson. Telluride, which famously never announces its lineup until the eve of the festival, is expected to showcase Chloé Zhao’s Shakespeare-inspired Hamnet, with Paul Mescal, and Edward Berger’s The Ballad of a Small Player, starring Colin Farrell.

“We are lucky in a sense because we come at the beginning of the new season,” says Venice artistic director Alberto Barbera. “We come one week before Toronto, so we can have the world premiere of most of the films. The fact that a film can travel to other festivals or win the Oscars — which happens a lot — helps confirm and establish the position of the festival in the international calendar.”

This all matters because, increasingly, theatrical releases and P&A spend are tied directly to awards season. “Awards spend is the final big spend left for launching a film, particularly an indie,” notes an awards consultant representing several high-profile titles this fall. “Picking the right festival for launch can determine how much awards attention you get, which determines how much money the distributor will put behind your theatrical release.”

For publicists and awards strategists, Venice’s reputation as an awards-season launchpad can be both a blessing and a challenge. “The good news and the bad news about Venice is that those films that are selected early on are always seen in the light of their being conceived as ‘awards films,’ ” says Charles MacDonald, a veteran festival PR handling Jim Jarmusch’s 2025 Venice competition title Father Mother Sister Brother. “While that can be a good thing, it can also put the press in the mind of, ‘OK, impress me, dazzle me.’ ”

If you’ve got an art house masterpiece — The Brutalist, Poor Things, Nomadland — the Lido is the place to go. More mainstream movies can get shorter shrift. “If your film isn’t necessarily for cinephiles, then Toronto or Telluride is probably a better bet,” says MacDonald. “Those are more public-facing festivals, which Venice clearly isn’t. You can take a film to Toronto, and, on the basis of an audience reaction, regardless of the critical reaction, you can really build an awards campaign.”

In the recent past, top awards contenders would make the full Venice–Telluride–Toronto whistle-stop circuit, using each festival to target a different constituency: international critics and voters at Venice, U.S. tastemakers and guild influencers in Telluride, and mass audiences in Toronto. But the escalating battle for world premieres has made that approach far less practical. Films that debut in Venice or Telluride often find their TIFF slot pushed into the festival’s second week — long after most press have left. Budget and schedule pressures mean many journalists exit Toronto after opening weekend, leaving those late-screening titles with diminished coverage.

The shift has blunted the impact of Toronto’s once-potent People’s Choice Award, a prize long seen as an awards-season springboard. Last year’s winner, Mike Flanagan’s The Life of Chuck, has barely registered in the Oscar conversation, a reminder that premiere timing can shape a campaign’s trajectory before it truly begins.

Cost is another deciding factor. “Venice has always been pricey,” says MacDonald, noting that for any recognizable talent, staying on the Lido, where “autograph hunters and amateur photographers” pack the Excelsior’s foyer, is untenable. “So you get into the whole water taxi thing, which becomes incredibly expensive,” he notes. Telluride and Toronto have their own financial hurdles: Press at Telluride have to buy a pricey festival pass ($780 for the all-access one) and discouragement of overt campaigning can mean less awards bang for the buck, while Toronto’s nearly-300-title program can dilute focus on prestige contenders.

Still, Venice offers one clear advantage: visibility. “If you make a splash on the red carpet in Venice, that goes around the world,” MacDonald notes. “It’s a much more effective tool than necessarily sitting down doing a day’s worth of junket interviews. However, the people that vote for awards tend to not just look at social media, but they do read reviews, talent interviews, film blogs and so on. So buzz can be created from a red carpet appearance, but for a real awards run, you need more substance.”

The numbers back up the investment. Over the past five years, Venice titles have delivered more Oscar wins than any other festival. Alongside its eight “Big 5” trophies — best picture, director, actor, actress and screenplay — the Lido has been a steady pipeline for contenders across categories. Cannes has scored with Anora, Emilia Pérez, Anatomy of a Fall and The Zone of Interest but trails Venice’s overall tally. Toronto has parlayed its People’s Choice wins into Oscar runs for American Fiction and The Eyes of Tammy Faye, while Telluride remains a magnet for critics and guilds, though both lag far behind Venice’s strike rate.

In total, Venice premieres have claimed 20 Oscars in the past five years, compared with 11 each for Cannes and Sundance, 10 for Toronto and just three for Telluride. The Academy’s evolving demographics — around 30 percent of voting members are now based outside the U.S., with this year marking the first time every category included an international nominee — have only enhanced Venice’s position. The festival’s focus on global auteurs plays directly to the tastes of this expanded electorate.

For Barbera, the formula is straightforward: “We are in the right position on the calendar. If we do our job well and get the best films possible, then the rest follows.”  

This story appeared in the Aug. 20 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.