Oscar race begins at Toronto film fest

By Jake Coyle

AP Entertainment Writer

The roads taken to the Academy Awards are many, but they usually run through Toronto.

Every best picture winner since 2007 has played at the Toronto International Film Festival, from “No Country for Old Men” to last year’s winner, “Argo.” While other late summer festivals like Telluride can claim to have been first with many Oscar winners, Toronto is the largest, most expansive launch pad of the fall movie-going season.

This year’s festival, a 10-day affair beginning Thursday with the premiere of the WikiLeaks drama “The Fifth Estate,” with Benedict Cumberbatch as Julian Assange, promises to be no different. There are 146 feature films making their world premiere, including the highly anticipated adaptation of Tracy Letts’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play “August: Osage County,” with Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts; “Dallas Buyers Club,” with Matthew McConaughey as an industrious Texan diagnosed in the ‘80s with HIV; and the kidnapping drama “Prisoners,” with Hugh Jackman and Jake Gyllenhaal.

“It’s like the major leagues. That’s how it feels,” says Gyllenhaal, who’s also premiering another film with “Prisoners” director Denis Villeneuve, the experimental Jose Saramago adaptation “Enemy.”

Many films that have just recently screened at Telluride or Venice will also come to Toronto, including Alfonso Cuaron’s space odyssey “Gravity,” with Sandra Bullock and George Clooney; Steve McQueen’s slavery epic “Twelve Years a Slave”; and Jason Reitman’s “Labor Day,” a drama about a mother’s (Kate Winslet) run-in with an escaped convict (Josh Brolin).

No awards are handed out at Toronto, but Academy Awards handicapping is rampant. Still, seeking an Oscar is far from the only motivation at one of the world’s most elite platforms for ambitious cinema, one laid out for both Hollywood industry frenzy and cinephile gluttony.

“A lot of that does begin in Toronto because our audience here has become known for having a good nose for quality films and finding films like ‘Slumdog Millionaire,’ ‘The King’s Speech,’ ‘Argo’ and ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ — even going back to ‘American Beauty’ in 1999,” says Cameron Bailey, TIFF artistic director.

Though Toronto is primarily a place where movies get their start, this year’s festival is full of endings. Two films co-starring the late “Glee” actor Corey Monteith will premiere: “All the Wrong Reasons,” in which he plays a department store manager, and “McCanick,” where he plays a felon on the run. Closing the festival will be “Life of Crime,” with Jennifer Aniston, an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s crime novel “The Switch.” The author died in August.