Pete Hammond

As per custom , organizers of the 40th Annual Telluride Film Festival held their schedule back and announced this morning just as a planeload of stars, filmmakers, journalists, executives, publicists and many Academy members were on the runway readying for takeoff to this Labor Day rocky mountain tradition which is now a key part, along with Venice, Toronto and New York in launching players into the Oscar race. Of course the Telluride Fest, one of the best of all fests, sports all kinds of films and events( enough to satisfy a cinefile for an entire year). But in recent times it has joined those other key Fall fests as an early gauge of goodies for the nascent awards season too.

Because they hold back their announcement, don’t require bragging rights, and don’t call anything a “premiere” (leaving that distinction to Venice, Toronto or NY), Telluride often gets some of the cream of the crop. Among recent past Best Picture nominees and winners which got their North American launch here are Slumdog Millionaire, The King’s Speech, The Artist, Juno, Capote, Up In The Air, and last year’s eventual BP winner, Argo which came in as an unannounced “sneak preview”. Figuring lightning could strike twice Warner Bros has definitely caught the often independent-minded Telluride bug and is bringing Alfonso Cuaron and his intimate space epic Gravity directly here for a Saturday debut from its smash Venice FF debut earlier today. Warners  clearly has an Argo-like Oscar season blueprint in mind for the film which has received rapturous reviews (including for star Sandra Bullock) out of its opening night slot on the Lido and will launch stateside on October 4th,  the exact week Argo debuted last year.

A true Telluride first will be Jason Reitman’s adaptation of Joyce Maynard’s best seller, Labor Day starring Kate Winslet and Josh Brolin. It stops here, with its first screening tomorrow afternoon, before heading to its “official” premiere next week in Toronto. I am told by someone who already saw it to expect no “dry eyes” in the house. Reitman is virtually a Telluride regular who also debuted Juno and  Up In The Air here. Both brought him Directing Oscar nods. Ralph Fiennes is here too starring and directing in The Invisible Woman, another Telluride debut that will grab Oscar-watcher attention this weekend.

Among the other anticipated Oscar contenders are several first seen at Cannes in May and getting their first shot in North America here. They include Alexander Payne’s Nebraska for which Telluride-junkie Payne and star Bruce Dern are making the trek (Dern was on the plane this morning). Robert Redford , an early Best Actor front-runner after Cannes, will be here for a special career tribute and screenings of his tour-de-force performance in All Is Lost  (10/18) from director/writer J.C.Chandor. The Coen Brothers along with their musical muse, T Bone Burnett also get a tribute and first-ever U.S.  screenings of their Cannes Grand Prize winner , Inside Llewyn Davis which CBS Films releases in December. It’s a little surprising and unusual  to see Nebraska, Llewyn Davis and All Is Lost doing Telluride but skipping Toronto in favor of NY later in September.  It is however  absolutely no surprise that the film that beat Llewyn Davis for the Palme d’Or, Blue Is The Warmest Color - that three hour French sensation about a lesbian romance - will be making its North American debut here.  Director Abdellatif Kechiche and its extraordinary stars  Adele Exarchopoulos and Lea Seydoux will be attending with the film. As I have previously noted , it is ineligible for the Foreign Language Oscar due to a technicality but Sundance Selects will be releasing October 25th to qualify in most other categories. It was recently rated NC-17 for its highly explicit love scenes and should cause waves here.

Oscar-winning Iranian director Asghar Farhadi , who was first in Telluride two years ago debuting his eventual Best Foreign Film winner A Separation, will also be back with another Cannes refugee The Past starring Cannes Best Actress winner  Berenice Bejo. She isn’t currently scheduled to join Farhadi here but several actors with Oscar potential will be hitting Telluride this weekend including Redford, Dern,  Llewyn Davis’ terrific lead Oscar Issac, Exarchopoulos and Seydoux, Tracks star Mia Wasikowska (who is also excellent in The Double debuting in Toronto), and Berlin Best Actress winner Paulina Garcia who has won raves for her work in Chile’s near-certain Oscar entry Gloria.

That’s only a partial list of the Oscar potential films on display here. In addition to Gloria and The Past, France’s Before The Winter Chill  starring Kristin Scott Thomas (way overdue for an Oscar nom), India’s The Lunchbox which distributor Sony Pictures Classics is uber-high on, Poland’s Ida  and Israel’s likely entry, Bethlehem, giving festgoers a mini-preview of some top foreign language race contenders.

Then there are the three scheduled “sneak previews”.  Sometimes nervous distributors not wanting to rock the boat at other festivals will play ball with Telluride and allow the fest to spring these unannounced titles (such as Argo last year) as additions outside the main program. The Fest says it will start announcing these tomorrow and there are plenty of TBA spots in the official program to accommodate them.  One person in the know told me one of them comes from “an Oscar winning director”, and it’s not Martin Scorsese whose hotly anticipated November release The Wolf Of Wall Street won’t be here even though Paramount’s other two big awards-bait films, Nebraska  and  Labor Day are on the schedule (Par’s Megan Colligan is among the studio’s execs attending). One I can definitely guess is Fox Searchlight’s biggie, 12 Years A Slave. Not only did a Searchlight contingent including co-President Nancy Utley arrive  today, but the festival’s own official magazine listed a Saturday 4pm conversation with the film’s  director Steve Mc Queen  and co-stars Chewitel Ejiofor (another potential Best Actor contender), Michael Fassbender and  Lupita Nyong’o.  My guess that means the movie must be screening here Friday.

As for the third “sneak” , no one’s really talking and there are several titles being bandied about , most prominently Bill Condon’s The Fifth Estate which is the official opening night film in Toronto on September 5th. Could it make a pit stop here? Hmmm. Still, using a little Sherlock Holmesian powers of deduction, another good guess could be Warner Bros and Alcon’s dramatic thriller Prisoners which stars Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal and many others. It opens September 20 , so getting the word out before it’s official Toronto debut next week makes sense. It comes from French-Canadian director Denis Villeneuve who made a major splash in Telluride in 2010 with Incendies evetually leading to an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film. That gives him cred with the festival. Plus  it has been showing to select press in LA this week after being delivered to the studio over the weekend so it’s ready.

At any rate if either Fifth Estate (from Disney/DreamWorks) or Prisoners were to show up,  Telluride would be sporting a much larger than usual major studio presence this week including two from Paramount and two from Warners.  Usually this festival is a much bigger playground for the independent labels who like to do a soft launch of their Oscar contenders here. It seems odd that The Weinstein Company, perhaps the biggest Oscar player of all apparently has nothing in the lineup  - at least of those films so far announced. Could Harvey have one of those sneaks?

It ought to be a very interesting weekend.

Awards Columnist Pete Hammond - tip him here.