Toronto: Generating Oscars Buzz

The Toronto Film Festival usually creates a lot of buzz around the possible nominations for the Oscars. The Festival, featuring 349 films from 55 countries, features the North American premieres of many films that will be considered for key awards. Since the festival still has 5 days to go, it’s way too early to get a good sense of which films will be front-runners, but we will try to summarize the buzz. The nominations itself will be advertised in January, so obviously the picture will look different by then. Some movies will have dropped out the race, but maybe we 'guessed' right. Only time will tell us.

One of the films that seems destined to stay in the race is Atonement, a major buzz generator in both the Venice and Toronto International Film Festivals. It stars Keira Knightley and James McAvoy as a pre-WWII love couple driven apart by class prejudice.

Further on there are two buzz-generating performances, one of them being Cate Blanchett. You would expect the buzz to be generated by the heavily-hyped Elizabeth: The Golden Age, in which she plays the 16th century English monarch, but instead of it her role as Bob Dylan in I'm not There has been praised. A nomination as supporting actress would be a possibility.

Casey Affleck's role as Robert Ford alongside Brad Pitt in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford has also generated a lot of positive responses. Not only by the public, but the film has also been lauded by critics.

Critics also climbed their pens in a positive manner for the Sean Penn-directed Into the Wild and the Coen Brother's No Country for Old Men, which was also well received at the Cannes Film Festival.

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