Awards season kicks off at Toronto

Red carpet preems launch kudos buzz

By GABRIEL SNYDER, STEVEN ZEITCHIK

TORONTO -- The Oscar season was in full swing on Saturday at the Toronto International Film Festival as a bevy of titles vied for early front-runner status in the kudos race.

Kudos contenders lining up on Saturday included full-blown red-carpet galas for the Ridley Scott-Russell Crowe reunion pic "A Good Year" and Alejandro González Iñárritu's "Babel" starring Brad Pitt, as well as lower-key dinners for Pedro Almodovar's "Volver" from Sony Pictures Classics and Miramax's "Venus."

Focus, too, was priming for another Oscar run by bringing in director Phillip Noyce in preparation for Sunday bow of the Tim Robbins-starrer "Catch a Fire," while Sony preemed its Will Ferrell-starring "Stranger Than Fiction," helmed by Marc Forster and penned by Zach Helm.

The combination of earlier Academy voting deadlines and the influx of media in recent years has made the fest a prime launching pad for kudos campaigns.

"As the Academy dates are moved up, it becomes more and more important to start earlier," said Sony Pictures co-prexy Michael Barker.

Events held on Saturday ranged from street-clogging red-carpet galas to more moderate sized world premieres to more intimate dinner parties. Though they may not have much in common on the surface, make no mistake, they were all campaign events to push pics to the top of the list of titles people will be talking about when the field of Oscar contenders is winnowed by word of mouth later in the fall.

While stars like Crowe, Dustin Hoffman, Samuel L. Jackson and Matt Dillon are in town as much to market their projects to a wider aud, Toronto is also an insider event meant to build industry buzz.

Both sides of Toronto were on display at the "Babel" gala where, inside the stately Roy Thomson Hall, Innarritu talked up the early Oscar candidate in high-minded tones, saying that "the incredible journey" of filming was "such a powerful experience we were transformed by the nature of it."

Meanwhile, the squeals of hordes of teen girls gathered to get a glimpse of Pitt on the red carpet could be heard more than two blocks away. In front of scads of TV cameras and photographers Pitt talked about his and Angelina Jolie's baby Shiloh.

The crowds of onlookers who filled a full city block of downtown Toronto may not end up seeing the complex interlocking tale set in Morocco, Tunisia, Mexico and Japan, with a largely unknown foreign cast, but Pitt's presence put it on the map for the dozens of media stationed outside, and from there the Oscar machinery can begin to grind. It's telling that Pitt got top billing at the film's intros despite his comparatively small role.

Uptown, Sony Pictures Classics and Miramax both threw dinner parties to fete the pics they're pushing this season.

Journos -- none of whom had their pens and pads out during what's considered an off-the-record event -- lined up to get a chance to chat informally with "Volver" star Penelope Cruz and helmer Pedro Almodovar and the hulking Teuton helmer of "The Lives of Others," Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck.

At Miramax's "Venus" dinner, the journos on hand mingled with people like film's scribe Haneif Kureish and Miramax topper Daniel Battsek.

The focus on studio pics that can also win awards is in keeping with -- and in fact encompasses the dual aspects of -- the Toronto fest circa 2006: glitz and seriousness.

Somewhere in between was the preem of "Stranger Than Fiction." Plenty of TV outlets showed up to catch a glimpse of cast members Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson and Dustin Hoffman. Asked to say a few words to the sold-out crowd before the movie started, Ferrell joshed, "I just want to say it's so nice of you to show up (but) it's not in this theater. It's in the CN Tower and they're only showing it to 20 people at a time."

And fest's first notable acquisition Saturday had award-season scrawled all over it: Werner Herzog's "Rescue Dawn," had been bought by a resurgent MGM, with announcement Saturday timed to the world preem and fest party.

Buy, conducted after relatively few screenings, suggest MGM wants to make a splash in the awards pool.

But if the fest on Saturday showed signs of continuing its evolution from marketplace to marketing platform, that only seemed to intensify the interest in one of the pics that was up for sale.

Specialty divisions and indie distribs closely circled "Vince Vaughn's Wild West Comedy" Saturday, as Vaughn took meetings with many of them, after pressing the flesh late into the night Friday at a King Street party.

But the heat doesn't mean price will necessarily climb high into the seven figures. No deal has closed yet, but acquisition execs and sales reps keeping close tabs say they expected news within a day.

Other weekend debuts, like Christina Ricci-starer "Penelope" and "Love and Other Disasters" got mixed reviews from execs.

And in other acquisition news today, Strand Releasing nabbed rights to Aki Kaurismaki's "Lights in the Dusk" from producer Match Factory, the latest pic from the Finnish helmer.