What Venice 2024 tells us about next year’s Oscars, from sure-fire nominees to Joker: Folie à Deux’s chances

Festivalgoers were treated to a first look at the films and actors who’ll be in contention for awards next year, writes Geoffrey Macnab

‘Babygirl’ star Nicole Kidman, Joaquin Phoenix in ‘Joker: Folie à Deux’ and Daniel Craig in ‘Queer’ (Getty/Warner Bros Pictures)

The Venice Film Festival is justly seen as the bellwether for the Oscars. Birdman, Spotlight and Nomadland are just some of the Best Picture winners to have surfaced here first. That is why industry watchers pay so much attention to what plays well on the Lido.

Venice’s 2024 edition, which ended at the weekend, was as notable for the blazing intensity of the acting as for the films themselves. On the evidence here, next year’s Academy Awards will be ferociously competitive in the Best Actor and Best Actress category.

The festival programme presented a tantalising array of very big name stars in unusual and unexpected movies. Daniel Craig was facing his biggest challenge since his Bond days as a gay, junkie expat American writer, adrift in 1950s Mexico, in Luca Guadagnino’s Queer. George Clooney was moving in the opposite direction, trying to reinvent himself as a plausible action star in Jon Watts’ thriller Wolfs. Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton were in Spanish maestro Pedro Almodóvar’s first US movie. Angelina Jolie was playing an opera legend. Joaquin Phoenix was back as the demented clown with the rictus smile in Joker: Folie à Deux.

Some delivered, some didn’t.

Craig was one actor who emerged with his reputation significantly enhanced. He has already demonstrated in the Knives Out films that he can play offbeat and even camp characters very different from 007. Guadagnino, though, was making heavy demands on him in his role as author William Lee (based on Beat novelist William Burroughs). In his white linen suit, and with a gun, Lee may look like Bond on foreign assignment in the early scenes, but here he is in pursuit of gay male lovers, not Smersh agents.

Although he lost out as best actor to veteran French actor Vincent Lindon (as the anguished dad whose son embraces violent far-right politics in The Good Son), Craig’s portrayal of the dapper, sardonic, self-destructive author ranks with his boldest work. Whatever sexual or drug-induced misadventures befall him, Craig’s queer author never loses his composure. Awards voters are likely to be shaken and stirred both by his poise and his daring.

Another fine performance by a British actor came from Jude Law, continuing his impressive recent run of character roles as a crumpled, moustachioed, middle-aged FBI agent investigating a white supremacist group in Justin Kurzel’s The Order. With its formulaic plot, the movie itself couldn’t escape cop story cliché.

Clooney, meanwhile, hit a dead end. He and Pitt play professional underworld fixers who “clean up” when crimes go wrong in Wolfs. This is the kind of comedy thriller that, a generation ago, Hitchcock or Stanley Donen might have made with Cary Grant in the lead. The two actors, who also co-starred in Ocean’s Twelve, have neither the unflappable elegance of Grant nor his comic timing. They may have charmed fans in Venice but you can’t see Wolfs having any awards traction whatsoever.

Certain other Venice titles now look set to fall by the wayside after mixed responses on the Lido. Joker: Folie à Deux, Todd Phillips’s sequel, was deemed by some to be too dour and to have “criminally” underused Lady Gaga. Others (myself included) marvelled at Phoenix’s multi-layered performance as the hapless psychotic, Arthur Fleck, like a dog with a broken paw one moment and malevolence incarnate in his Joker persona the next. However, the Venice jury wasn’t swayed by Arthur’s antics and it remains to be seen if Academy voters will be won over a second time by a movie inspired by comic-book characters.

The jury under president Isabelle Huppert, who knows a tour de force when she sees it, chose Nicole Kidman for the Best Actress award for Halina Reijn’s steamy thriller Babygirl.

Nicole Kidman won Venice’s Best Actress award for her role opposite Harris Dickinson in ‘Babygirl’ (A24)

We’ve all seen Kidman in TV dramas like The Perfect Couple and Expats, giving accomplished but slightly stiff and mannered performances. Here, she digs much deeper. The Australian plays the CEO of an AI/robotics firm who begins a sadomasochistic relationship with a young male intern (Harris Dickinson).

Reijn is one of the Netherlands’ most respected stage actors, well known for her work with the controversial Ivo van Hove. She elicits Kidman’s best performance in years as the headstrong, fiercely independent businesswoman whose sexual submissiveness never seems like weakness. A film that could have slipped into voyeuristic prurience is instead witty, subversive and emotionally revealing.

For all her feral and fiery brilliance, Kidman will face strong competition when Oscar time comes around. Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door deservedly won Venice’s main honour. The Golden Lion winner, and Moore and Swinton, are well worth Oscar nominations of their own for their fearless and deeply moving work.

The Room Next Door is a cool, autumnal melodrama, directed with subtlety and grace by the Spanish maestro (who shows no awkwardness whatsoever in working in English). He is wise enough to concentrate his camera on the two leads and to let their endlessly expressive faces do most of the work.

Swinton plays Martha, an ex-war correspondent with terminal cancer. Moore is the bestselling author Ingrid who used to be Martha’s best friend (although they’ve drifted apart). Martha is planning an assisted suicide and Ingrid accompanies her to upstate New York where she’s spending her final days. Both women excel in roles that rekindle memories of the most intense and probing character studies made by the late Ingmar Bergman.

Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore in Pedro Almodóvar’s Golden Lion-winning ‘The Room Next Door’ (Warner Bros Pictures)

Another female star in Venice who is now bound to receive a major Oscar push is Jolie. She is in imperious form as the ageing opera legend Maria Callas in Pablo Larraín’s Maria. Jolie even did some of her own opera singing. Awards voters always love it when stars multi-task like this, and many are bound to be impressed anyway by the mixture of hauteur and vulnerability that Jolie brings to her role.

One movie already being talked up as an Oscar frontrunner is Brady Corbet’s monumental (215 minutes long) The Brutalist, an epic saga about a Hungarian-born Jewish architect (Adrien Brody) who survives the Holocaust and builds a career in America. Detractors complained the film, which won the Venice Silver Lion, was like an ersatz version of a Paul Thomas Anderson epic but others were raving about it. Its length could even be a selling point come the Oscar race. It’s a novelty to have films today that have intermissions.

It’s eminently possible for directors and stars on the Lido to see their hopes of awards glory sink instantly to the bottom of the Venice Lagoon. Films that don’t play well here can become very hard to salvage. For Kidman, Jolie, Daniel Craig and co, though, Venice has provided the perfect lift-off for their expected Oscar runs.