One of the most special things about this year's Toronto Film Festival, which wrapped up earlier this week, was seeing Al Pacino in top form in not one but two special presentations screenings.

As much as anything, Gregory Mosher's new Broadway revival of A.R. Gurney's 1988 dramedy Love Letters — which opened Thursday night at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, will be running there through Feb. 15 (see THR's review) and may well contend for Tonys next spring — made me think about the wide variety of ways in which the passage of time can be conveyed through the different art forms.

The Judge's lead actor Robert Downey, Jr., Foxcatcher's supporting actor Mark Ruffalo, Mr. Turner's writer-director Mike Leigh and two beloved British actresses of different generations, Dame Judi Dench and Emma Watson, will be this year's honorees at BAFTA Los Angeles' 23rd annual Britannia Awards on Oct. 30 at the Beverly Hilton, the organization announced Thursday.

The gala dinner and ceremony, which raises funds for BAFTA-LA's education, preservation and philanthropic efforts, is an early and high-profile stop on the annual awards circuit that fetes Brits and non-Brits alike "who have dedicated their careers to advancing the art forms of the moving image in the US, UK and beyond."

Comedian Rob Brydon will return as host for the second consecutive year. (The ceremony will air on BBC America on  Nov 2 at 9pm EST.) And BAFTA's Bumble Ward and Deborah Kolar will serve as the event's co-chairs.

This year's best animated feature Oscar race, which is already jam-packed with as many as 17 eligible contenders — having just 16 automatically triggers an increase in the number of eventual nominees from three to five — is about to get even more crowded. That's because Barrett Esposito's Henry & Me, a simply animated but charming and inspirational children's film that features the vocal talents of Richard Gere and many other big names, including quite a few members of the New York Yankees organization, is in the process of being qualified for Oscar eligibility by its independent distributor, Reveal Animation Studios.

The Austin Film Festival and Screenwriters Conference, which has become one of the many important stops on the awards season circuit over the last few years — particularly for Oscar- and Emmy-contending screenwriters — has announced the lineup for its 21st edition, which will take place in the Texas capital from Oct. 23-30.

The New York Film Festival is entering its 52nd year, but never before, in its long and rich history, has it done what it did today: namely, added a film — Laura Poitras' new documentary about Edward Snowden, CITIZENFOUR — to its main slate after the lineup had already been announced.

On Monday night, most of New York's acting community, on their night off from the boards, could be found in one of two places. Many were attending the American Theatre Wing's annual gala at the Plaza Hotel, where the legendary Angela Lansbury was feted. And the rest, it seemed, could be found at the historic Ziegfeld Theatre, where Stephen Sondheim, Mike Nichols and Scott Rudin — a Big Apple all-star trio, if ever there was one — hosted a special advance screening of Pride, a feel-good dramedy about a little-known slice of U.K. history which CBS Films will release on Sept. 26.

It had its world premiere as the closing night film of the Directors' Fortnight section of the May's Cannes Film Festival and its North American premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last week, and now joins a relatively thin field of Golden Globe contenders in the musical or comedy categories.

Shekhar Kapur, the Indian filmmaker best known internationally for his two collaborations with Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth (1998) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), will serve as chairman of the 19th Capri, Hollywood — The International Film Festival, the Gulf of Naples-based fest said Monday. This year's edition will run from Dec. 26, 2014, through Jan. 2, 2015.

Advertised as "a bridge between Italian and American cinema," the event occurs two months before its stateside counterpart, Los Angeles, Italia, which occurs the week of the Academy Awards. Since it honors talent at both locations, it has become a noted stop on the Oscar season circuit.

Every week through the 87th Oscars on Feb. 22, 2015, The Hollywood Reporter's lead awards analyst Scott Feinberg will post an updated "Feinberg Forecast," wherein he presents a summary of major developments since the last update that helped to shape his current opinions and then lists his revised projections. For more about Feinberg and how he arrives at his projections, scroll to the bottom of this post.

Factoring into this week's charts...

In Escobar: Paradise Lost, an intense drama that marks the directorial debut of the Italian actor Andrea Di Stefano, The Hunger Games' Josh Hutcherson portrays Nick, the character with the most screen time, a young Canadian who meets and marries Maria (Claudia Traisac, now Hutcherson's real-life girlfriend), a young girl in Colombia, where Nick had gone to surf and live with his brother.

Over his decades in the television and film documentary business, filmmaker Robert Kenner has established himself as a Michael Lewis-like figure, pointing his lens at subjects with which most of us feel we are already familiar, but then showing us that we're not by asking them questions we wouldn't have thought to ask ourselves.

Kenner did this most prominently in his 2009 Oscar-nominated doc Food, Inc., which looks at the shocking shortcuts that multinational corporations take with our food and the impact this has on our health. And he has done it again in his latest doc, Merchants of Doubt, which Sony Classics is currently taking on the fall fest circuit: it premiered at Telluride, played at Toronto (where I caught up with it on Wednesday) and will next be seen in New York.

Only one filmmaker has ever been nominated for the best documentary feature Oscar in back-to-back years. His name was Walt Disney and he was nominated — and ultimately won — for both The Living Desert (1953) and The Vanishing Prairie (1954). In those days, an organization (i.e. the U.S. Air Force) or its figurehead (i.e. Disney's Disney) were often recognized for projects that were actually primarily completed by others who worked for them. That was certainly the case with these nature films.

Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne, Belgian brothers who have been making films together since the 1970s, are, to me, the successors of Vittorio de Sica, the father of neorealist cinema, whose films were, as theirs always are, low-budget, minimalist dramas about the struggles of working-class people just to get by.

Over the past 15 years, three of the Dardennes' films — Rosetta (1999), The Son (2002) and The Child (2005) — have been submitted by Belgium as the nation's official entry for consideration in the best foreign language film Oscar category. However, despite the fact that each was widely acclaimed and the first and third won Cannes' Palme d'Or (they remain the only Belgian films ever accorded that honor), none were even nominated by the Academy.

On Sept. 19, Belgium can do its part to correct this injustice by submitting as their 2014 entry the Dardennes' latest film, Two Days, One Night, which many expected to win this year's Palme or another major prize at Cannes, where it premiered to great acclaim back in May, but which was instead shut out. Then it would be up to the Academy's foreign language committee to get its act together.