‘The Big Short,’ ‘Spotlight’ and ‘Son of Saul’ could be crashing the Oscar race

Beyond the unique pairing of Julianne Moore and Kristen Stewart, there was little buzz for the Alzheimer’s-themed drama “Still Alice” before its premiere on a busy Monday afternoon at the Toronto International Film Festival last year. For various reasons, the independent film was almost an afterthought at an event that annually screens more than 300 titles. A little under two hours and one massive standing ovation later there was little doubt to anyone in the famed Elgin theater that Moore’s performance was destined to finally earn her a richly deserved Academy Award.

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That out-of-the-blue awards season contender is pretty much a given in recent years — consider 2008’s “The Wrestler” or 2004’s “Million Dollar Baby.” The question now is not if the surprise entries will come but when and where they will affect the race. Sometimes they are major box-office hits that strike a chord with the academy, such as John Lee Hancock’s “The Blind Side” in 2009 or, potentially this season, Ridley Scott’s “The Martian.” These party crashers might even be a foreign-language film that ends up appealing to other branches of the academy, a story line quite familiar to Michael Barker, Sony Pictures Classics’ co-president and co-founder.

Against all odds the mini-major studio guided “Amour” to five Oscar nominations in 2013 including best picture, director and actress. Many now believe the Hungarian film “Son of Saul” may find a way to duplicate “Amour’s” best picture nomination achievement, a notion that would have been considered a stretch even after the film made waves at Cannes.

“The fact of the matter is, the quality of the piece is there that allows for the possibility for it to happen,” Barker says. “In ‘Son of Saul’ the cinematography is staggering. The sound, the editing, Géza Röhrig’s performance, the screenplay and even the production design. It has a distinctive quality that shows craftsmanship that’s just supreme. It may or may not get nominated in those categories, but the fact is you do have a chance because history is there to occasionally notice these foreign-language films in these ways and it makes sense.”

More often than not, however, the surprise players make their mark at a fall festival with little pre-premiere hype. This year’s top qualifier is Lenny Abrahamson’s “Room,” an adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s popular novel that has earned accolades for star Brie Larson’s lead performance and is seen as a likely picture nominee. Despite the novel’s success, any best picture chatter would have been considered a reach before its premiere at the 2015 Telluride Film Festival. So far the ride has been a textbook example of how under-the-radar contenders hope to affect the season.

When Abrahamson and producer Ed Guiney screened an early cut of the film for U.S. distributor A24 in April, the studio presented what the filmmaker humbly joked is the “fantasy” release strategy. First, you screen the film at best picture kingmaker Telluride where, along with Tom McCarthy’s “Spotlight,” “Room” became one of the most talked about films at the festival.

“It then takes that buzz into Toronto where it goes crazy because everyone has already heard of it,” Abrahamson says. “And lo and behold it occurred exactly as they hoped for with the added bonus of winning an Audience Award at Toronto that was totally unexpected.”

It should be noted that six of the last seven recipients have gone on to be nominated for an Oscar.

This season’s biggest surprise player, however, may turn out to be Adam McKay’s “The Big Short,” a film that wrapped filming just this May. Based on the true story of four individuals who predicted the credit and housing crisis nearly a decade ago, the drama may find itself in the mix for picture, actor (Steve Carell) and supporting actor (Christian Bale) nominations.

Paramount Pictures (which also has an unlikely animated feature contender in the adult-themed “Anomalisa”) hadn’t planned on releasing the film this year until screening the first cut and realizing McKay had crafted, as Megan Colligan, the studio’s president of worldwide distribution and marketing, notes, “something pretty special.”

Even though Paramount Pictures has a history of successful Oscar campaigns for late-arriving pictures such as David O. Russell’s “The Fighter” and Ava DuVernay’s “Selma,” Colligan says “Short” isn’t just a last-minute addition to the schedule; rather, it’s a “once-in-a-blue-moon” scenario. A decision heightened by the fact McKay had just five weeks to finish the film to make its AFI Festival unveiling on Thursday. In “Short’s” case, however, it’s not just about the potential box-office advantages a late-season Oscar push can bring.

“There’s some timeliness to it and sometimes a movie has its own zeitgeisty rhythm and they need to go,” Colligan says. “You don’t want to hold them back.”

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