How Venice Launches Oscar Campaigns

Venice is the first major festival of awards season and the most reliable Oscar launchpad in the calendar. Here is why a Lido premiere matters and which films it has carried to the Academy Awards.

The Venice Film Festival launches Oscar campaigns because of where it sits in the calendar. Held in late August and early September, it is the first of the major fall festivals, so the films that premiere on the Lido set the awards-season narrative months before any Academy member votes. A premiere at Venice is not just a screening — it is the opening statement of an Oscar campaign, and a long run of Venice titles has carried that statement all the way to Best Picture.

What is the Venice Film Festival?

Venice (the Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica) is the oldest film festival in the world, founded in 1932, and a FIAPF A-list event. It runs each year on the Lido di Venezia in late summer; the 82nd edition closed in September 2025 with Jim Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother taking the Golden Lion. Its top prize, the Golden Lion (Leone d'Oro), is one of the most prestigious awards in cinema.

What sets Venice apart from the other A-list festivals is timing. Cannes runs in May, too early for the awards cycle; Venice runs at the end of August, exactly when the studios and specialty distributors want to fire the starting gun on their Oscar campaigns.

Why is Venice the start of the Oscar race?

Because awards season is a narrative, and Venice gets to write the first draft. The Oscar campaign runs roughly from late August to the ceremony the following March. Venice opens that window. The reviews that land on the Lido, the length of a premiere's standing ovation, and the trade-press verdict all become the film's opening position — the frame every later festival and screening either reinforces or fights against.

That first-mover advantage is why distributors increasingly hold their strongest prestige titles for a Venice world premiere rather than launching them at a market or a later festival. Get the narrative right in early September and you carry momentum for six months. Get it wrong, and no amount of campaign spend fully recovers it.

Which Venice premieres went on to win Oscars?

The track record is the reason the festival has the reputation it does. Films that world-premiered at Venice and went on to major Academy success since 2015 include:

• Spotlight (2015) — premiered at Venice, won Best Picture.
• La La Land (2016) — premiered on the Lido, won six Oscars including Best Director and Best Actress.
• The Shape of Water (2017) — won the Golden Lion at Venice, then Best Picture.
• Roma (2018) — won the Golden Lion, then three Oscars including Best Director.
• Joker (2019) — won the Golden Lion, then Best Actor and Best Original Score.
• Nomadland (2020) — won the Golden Lion and Best Picture, the rare double.
• Poor Things (2023) — won the Golden Lion, then four Oscars including Best Actress.

Two of those — The Shape of Water and Nomadland — won both the Golden Lion and Best Picture, the clearest possible proof that the Venice jury and the Academy are often reading the same films the same way.

What kind of film does Venice launch?

Prestige, director-driven, and increasingly English-language and star-led. Venice has become the place where auteur cinema and awards-season star vehicles meet — and, in the last decade, where the streamers stage their prestige plays. Netflix used Venice to launch Roma and The Power of the Dog; the festival now regularly hosts the kind of high-end, performance-forward dramas the Academy rewards.

This is the opposite end of the spectrum from a market festival. Venice is not where you go to sell territories off a sales sheet; it is where you go to convert a finished, ambitious film into an awards contender with a global press footprint.

How does a film use a Venice premiere?

It uses the premiere to manufacture the three things an Oscar campaign needs: reviews, a moment, and a distributor's conviction. The reviews set the critical floor. The premiere "moment" — the standing ovation, the photo, the quote — gives the publicity machine something to amplify. And a strong Lido launch firms up the distributor's belief that the film is worth a full awards spend, which is what actually pays for the campaign.

For a film that already has US distribution, Venice is the campaign's launch event. For a finished film still seeking a buyer, a breakout Venice premiere can be the thing that lands the deal — with the festival glow already attached.

Should you premiere at Venice?

Venice is the right launch when your film is a finished, prestige-level drama with genuine awards ambition and the backing (or the realistic hope of backing) to run a campaign. It rewards craft, performance and authorship, and it rewards them in front of the people who decide the season.

It is the wrong target for a genre film chasing a commercial sale, an unfinished rough cut, or a project with no distribution path and no resources to campaign — for those, a market or a discovery festival serves you better. But if you have built something the Academy might love, no festival gives it a better running start than the first one on the calendar.

Every A-list festival rewards a different kind of film, and a wasted premiere is hard to recover. Our guide Find the Right Film Festivals breaks down the tiers and the taste of each one, Venice, Cannes and Telluride included, and the premiere ladder that decides where you go first, so you premiere where your film's strengths are already in demand. See also what films Cannes selects, how a festival run actually costs out, and the full Festival Strategy library.