The Awards Pundits: Feinberg and Keegan on Telluride’s Rocky Mountain Highs and Lows

In keeping with annual tradition, The Hollywood Reporter’s executive editor (awards) Scott Feinberg and senior editor (film) Rebecca Keegan huddled at the end of this year’s Telluride Film Festival to discuss their Labor Day weekend in the Rockies. (Please note: THR will now be posting a written back-and-forth of this sort every month under the banner of ‘The Awards Pundits,’ with Feinberg, Keegan, deputy awards editor Beatrice Verhoeven and senior awards editor Steven Zeitchik all participating.)

FEINBERG Not to sound like Saturday Night Live’s Stefon, but the 2024 edition of Telluride seemingly had everything — or, at least, everyone. There was fake Donald Trump (The Apprentice’s Sebastian Stan) and real Jack Smith (flanked by three Secret Service agents, the special counsel investigating Trump was here to support wife Katy Chevigny’s film The Easy Kind); a guy who made a movie about SNL (Saturday Night’s director Jason Reitman) and a real SNL alumnus (Bill Murray, here with a film of his own, The Friend); Hillary and Chelsea Clinton (EPs of the doc Zurawski v. Texas), James Carville (subject of the doc Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid) and Mary Matalin, and Trey Parker and Matt Stone (the South Park creators came to promote their doc ¡Casa Bonita Mi Amor!); plus, Angelina Jolie, Nobu Matsuhisa, Martha Stewart, Pharrell Williams, Selena Gomez, Robbie Williams, Will Ferrell (with Harper Steele, his co-subject in the doc Will & Harper), virtually all of Denzel Washington’s family except for Denzel himself (in association with The Piano Lesson), a Navy SEAL (Marcus Capone, subject of the doc In Waves and War), a giant dog (Bing, one of Murray’s costars in The Friend) and both Kendall and Roman Roy (The Apprentice’s Jeremy Strong and A Real Pain’s Kieran Culkin, respectively).

KEEGAN The level of stardom in the Rockies this year is a pretty sharp contrast to last year’s quieter, SAG-strike affected fest. As for the films themselves, something unusual happened, Scott, which is that you and I actually agree on some of our favorites to premiere at Telluride, starting with Conclave (Focus, review), Edward Berger’s first film since his Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front. At a festival stuffed with political titles, this Vatican-set drama about a group of cardinals choosing a pope is the election year critique that won what counts as bipartisan support at THR.

FEINBERG Not only are you and I on the same page about Conclave, Rebecca, but so was virtually every other non-partisan festival attendee with whom I spoke, including a lot of Academy members. Conclave is probably as strong of a best picture contender as we’ve seen this year, and Ralph Fiennes, one of the greatest living actors who has never won an Oscar (Schindler’s List, Quiz Show, The English Patient, The Constant Gardener, The Hurt Locker and the list goes on), is certainly the new best actor frontrunner for a career-best turn.

KEEGAN The festival’s other world premiere that felt like a real happening was Jason Reitman‘s Saturday Night (Sony, review). Murray showed up to help introduce the first screening of the film, a love letter to Lorne Michaels’ singular brand of showmanship set in the 90 minutes leading up to the very first episode of Saturday Night Live in 1975. Reitman introduced the film’s first screening by recalling a one-week writing stint he did at SNL years ago, where the last 90 minutes before the show went live conjured “a level of adrenaline reserved for test pilots and heroin addicts.” The giddy, let’s-put-on-a-show energy of the movie matched that tone, and gave me the little boost I needed to stay up for the 10 p.m. U.S. premiere of The Apprentice.

FEINBERG Saturday Night is a lot of fun, marks a return to form for Reitman (think Thank You for Smoking, Juno and Up in the Air) and should be right up the alley of nostalgic awards voters of a certain age. A best ensemble SAG Award nom and Oscar noms for best picture and best original screenplay (Reitman co-wrote the script with Gil Kenan) are all very possible.

KEEGAN Interestingly, though, apart from Conclave and Saturday Night, don’t you think the movies that found the most traction in Telluride had previously screened elsewhere?

FEINBERG Absolutely. The hottest sales title, September 5 (review), a riveting dramatization of how ABC Sports covered the 1972 Munich Olympics terrorist attack, came to the fest from Venice. People were slow to catch up with it, but by the end of the fest it was one that everyone was talking about. A number of distributors are circling it, perhaps because they, like I, feel that it has real potential for picture and acting noms (Peter Sarsgaard and John Magaro, neither of whom have ever been nominated, are both great).

KEEGAN September 5 is painfully timely—not long after its first screening in Telluride on Saturday, news broke of the killing of six Israeli hostages in Gaza. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a topic that scares distributors, but the movie’s approach — embedding with reporters trying to figure out how to cover the Munich hostage crisis for a global audience — provides a way into the story that feels accessible to audiences.

FEINBERG Cannes, meanwhile, was the first to show Emilia Pérez (Netflix, review), the trans gangster musical — yes, you read that right — for which Gomez, Zoe Saldaña, Adriana Paz and breakout Karla Sofía Gascón shared that fest’s best actress prize. The film was as hot a ticket as any in Telluride — and not just because Gomez was on hand and extremely kind to fans, although that certainly didn’t hurt — and a favorite of festivalgoers from every demographic, which bodes well for its Oscar prospects. Even the competition admires it: Michael Barker, the longtime co-chief of Sony Classics, told me that, out of his entire career, it was the movie that he most wanted to acquire but was unable to. (Check out my Telluride interview with Saldaña, Gomez and Gascón.)

KEEGAN Emilia Pérez felt like it continued to build on the steam of Cannes, with the festival tributing its French director, Jacques Audiard, and with the charismatic actresses in town. This was the film I consistently heard delighting festival-goers I met in theater lines who hadn’t already had the opportunity to see it in Cannes.

FEINBERG Also coming from the Croisette and resonating strongly in the Rockies were Sean Baker’s off-the-wall, Palme d’Or winning Anora (Neon, review), with particular acclaim reserved for lead actress Mikey Madison’s performance as a stripper who gets caught up in a crazy situation; Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig (Neon, review), a film about a judge in present-day Iran, which won a special jury award in Cannes, forced Rasoulof to flee the country and has since been selected as Germany’s entry in the best international feature Oscar race (it probably will go head-to-head with Emilia Pérez); and the most scandalous film at the fest, Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice (Briarcliff, review), for which lead actor Stan, who plays a young Trump, and supporting actor Strong, who plays his mentor Roy Cohn, could both land recognition. (Check out my Telluride interview with Abbasi, Stan, Strong and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman.)

KEEGAN The Apprentice was the other big Saturday night event at the fest. There were a horde of us hoofing it up Columbia Ave. to make it in time from the Saturday Night premiere, and the two films made a rollicking double feature about period New York City. At Abbasi’s intro he confessed to being nervous about bringing his Trump movie “back home to you guys,” meaning a U.S. audience. “This is not a political hit piece,” he told us, “It’s a mirror.” I was gobsmacked at Stan and Strong’s performances in what unfolds as a most alarming buddy movie.

FEINBERG Finally, Sundance launched Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain (Searchlight, review), in which Eisenberg and Culkin play cousins who are very different from each other — you can guess who plays the neurotic one and who plays the smartass one — but take a trip together to Poland to honor their late grandmother. Culkin’s performance and Eisenberg’s original screenplay are both very much in the awards mix.

KEEGAN A hallmark of many of this year’s Telluride premieres was bold — even downright weird — artistic swings, starting with the movie that got the coveted Patron Preview screening slot, Morgan Neville’s animated LEGO portrait of Pharrell Williams, Piece by Piece (Focus, review). Acknowledging the sheer oddness of the concept, Neville introduced his film to us by saying, “For the last five years I have struggled to describe this movie. After today, that’s your problem.” Piece by Piece worked for me, and I suspect it will work for a broad range of audiences, from kids to hip-hop fans to middle-aged white people who cry easily (that’s me, and a decent chunk of the Academy).

FEINBERG It might well become only the second animated film ever nominated for the best documentary feature Oscar and only the second documentary feature ever nominated for the best animated feature Oscar (2021’s Flee was the first for both). Heck, in a relatively thin year, it could even become only the fourth animated film to land a best picture Oscar nom!

KEEGAN The U.K.’s answer to the audacious music biopic is Michael Gracey’s Better Man (Paramount, review), about British pop star Robbie Williams. This one will be a tougher sell to audiences in North America, where the former boy band singer never broke through as massively as he did in Europe. Perhaps even more challenging, however, is the film’s daring conceit: to have Williams played start to finish by a CGI monkey. The device distinguishes Better Man from the crush of other music biopics to which it might otherwise be compared, like Rocketman and Bohemian Rhapsody, but it also means that some emotionally climactic moments feel disconcertingly like scenes from a Planet of the Apes movie.

Other movies that reached artistically in ways that seemed to work more for the New York Film Critics Circle set than for moviegoing normies were Joshua Oppenheimer’s post-apocalyptic musical The End (Neon, review), which gives us a singing Tilda Swinton, Michael Shannon and George MacKay in a subterranean bunker; and Nickel Boys (Amazon/MGM, review), RaMell Ross’ adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, which unfolds through multiple perspectives and timelines. I didn’t get a chance to catch Nickel Boys here, and plan to see it back in LA after I’ve finished the book, which I’m hoping will help me follow its unorthodox structure.

FEINBERG I don’t know about you, but another thing about this awards season that the fest hammered home for me was how thin the male acting races are and how crowded the female acting races are. I mean, Netflix alone had on the ground the trio of Emilia Pérez stars (whose categories are still being sorting out — Gomez is decidedly supporting, but pushes for Saldaña and Gascón in either actress category could be justified); Jolie, who, in Venice and Telluride, garnered career-best reviews for her portrayal of the legendary opera singer Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín’s Maria (Netflix, review), and might well wind up with a second Oscar exactly 25 years after her first; and the standout of Malcolm Washington’s The Piano Lesson (review), Danielle Deadwyler. (Check out Rebecca’s cover story about Jolie and my Telluride interview with Jolie and Larraín.) Meanwhile, I can barely come up with five serious contenders for either best actor or best supporting actor.

KEEGAN An unusually high number of films arrived at Telluride this year in search of distribution, including some with a real sense of urgency. In addition to the aforementioned September 5, there’s also Zurawski v. Texas (review), Maisie Crow and Abbie Perrault’s doc about the landmark abortion case, which had one of the most electric premieres I’ve seen in over a decade of covering Telluride, thanks in part to Hillary Clinton’s fiery Q&A (which, full disclosure, I moderated). No streamers or studios have stepped up yet to distribute that topical film in time for audiences to see it before the November election, in which abortion is on the ballot in 10 states. Errol Morris’ Separated (review), about the Trump administration’s border policy of separating parents and children, is also still looking for a home.

FEINBERG Other outstanding docs with real awards potential that played at this year’s fest, but are still figuring out their U.S. distribution, include the aforementioned Carville: Winning is Everything, Stupid!, Matt Tyrnauer’s film about Carville’s efforts to convince Joe Biden to not seek re-election (review); In Waves and War, Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk’s film about the value of psychedelic therapy for people suffering from PTSD; Petra Costa’s Apocalypse in the Tropics (review), about Christian nationalists in Brazil; and Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor’s No Other Land (review), about the friendship of a Palestinian activist and an Israeli journalist amid hostilities in the West Bank.

KEEGAN Some movies seeking distribution at Telluride could play just as well to 2025 audiences, like The Friend (review), David Siegel and Scott McGehee’s light-handed adaptation of the beloved Sigrid Nunez novel of the same name, which stars Naomi Watts, Murray and aforementioned festival heartthrob Bing the Great Dane. Bing’s team seems to have taken a page from last year’s canine contender, Messi, of Anatomy of a Fall — this pooch attended the festival’s Patron Brunch, where he posed amiably for photos with passholders and showed up for the traditional Telluride class photo alongside festival stalwarts like Ken Burns.

FEINBERG I met Bing in the most unexpected of ways: I was with a bunch of strangers in a large van being driven from Telluride’s main street to the private residence at which the Patron Brunch is held when I felt a lick on the back of my ear. When I swung around and saw who it was, I had mixed emotions.

KEEGAN I’m sorry, Scott, but he licked your ear?! That’s it, folks. Campaigning has gone too far. 

FEINBERG In any event, another Telluride is in the books, and the focus of the awards industrial complex will shift — once Venice unveils Todd Phillips’ highly anticipated Joker: Folie à Deux (Warner Bros.) on Wednesday — to the Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 5-15), the London Film Festival (Oct. 9-20) and the New York Film Festival (Sept. 27-Oct. 14).

Awards hopefuls world premiering at TIFF include Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch (Searchlight), led by Amy Adams; John Crowley’s We Live in Time (A24), a two-hander starring Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh; Chris Sanders’ animated The Wild Robot (Universal); and R.J. Cutler’s doc Elton John: Never Too Late (Disney). Others having their North American premieres there include Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door (Sony Classics), which received a 17-minute standing ovation after its Venice world premiere (how long would Citizen Kane’s have lasted?); Luca Guadagnino’s Queer (A24), starring Daniel Craig; Halina Reijn’s Babygirl (A24), with Nicole Kidman; Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (Focus), led by Adrien Brody; and Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis (Lionsgate).

London will open, appropriately enough, with the world premiere of Steve McQueen’s Blitz (Apple). NYFF, for its part, will open with Nickel Boys, screen The Room Next Door mid-fest and close with the North American premiere of Blitz.

KEEGAN So much still to see! Who said there would be a drought of good films after last year’s strike paused the town? This time of year, as ever, feels like a flood.