THB Headline: Biennale'd It!

Official Awards of the 79th Venice Film Festival (contents below…)

What do the winners of this year’s 79th Biennale jury (chaired by Julianne Moore and comprised of Mariano Cohn, Leonardo Di Costanzo, Audrey Diwan, Leila Hatami, Kazuo Ishiguro and Rodrigo Sorogoyen) mean here in the United States of Oscar?

Almost nothing.

This is not to diminish the choices, but for Venice’s festival to impact the Oscar race, it has to be the start of a ball rolling down hill of consensus. And when the Golden Lion goes to a documentary - All The Beauty And The Bloodshed by Laura Poitras (USA) - it doesn’t even assure the film for an Oscar Best Documentary win.

Cate Blanchett winning Best Actress for TÁR is already a bit of a consensus pick, even if the film is making a lot of people itchy. (I haven’t reviewed the film, which I have seen, because I want to see it again before writing about it in any depth. It is a feast and a fist. I want to measure both more.)

Colin Farrell was already, amazingly, a se…