Award Season’s Key Weather Vane Is Thrown Off
Without actors to promote movies at the big film galas in Toronto and elsewhere, the winners and losers are less clear.
And the Academy Award goes to … who knows?
Photographer: Tim Boyle/Getty Images North AmericaWhen the actors of SAG-AFTRA joined the writers of the WGA on the strike line after failing to reach a new labor agreement with the Alliance of Motion Picture & Television Producers, one of the first points of concern was made clear by an anonymous studio executive to Variety: “Fall festivals are f***ed.”
With most of those events now in the rearview, the outcome is a bit more complicated than that; the fall festivals carried on, albeit in a more muted form, with awards buzz and big-money deals taking noticeable hits. The strikes have certainly complicated the landscape, but their nuances make the winners and losers hard to discern — at least for now.