Venice Film Festival Securing Bridges To Oscars

If you look up closer, there's a pattern being born from the Venice Film Festival, which rolls out a speedy highway up to the Hollywood and the Oscars. Actually there're two: the winner of the Golden Lion - straight to the Best Picture Oscar and a Mexican director as a rule.

Last year Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water received the Golden Lion in Venice and ended up with the Oscar at the following ceremony (not to mention a number of other prizes on the way). This year the 75th Venice Film Festival embraced Guillermo del Toro as the chair of the jury and the Golden Lion went to the Mexican director the second time in a row. Only to a different one - Alfonso Cuaron and his black-and-white drama Roma. Shall we expect the successive chain reaction? We'll have to wait and see.

The winner was of no surprise this year, as Roma was the most critically acclaimed feature at the Festival. It tells a story that chronicles a year in the life of a middle-class family in Mexico City in the early 1970s.

The other movie, which received applause from the audience was The Favourite by Yorgos Lanthimos. It received the Grand Jury Prize and the Coppa Volpi for the Best Actress, which went to a stunning Olivia Colman. The Favourite is about a frail Queen Anne and her friend Lady Sarah who actually governs England in her stead in the 18th century and a new servant Abigail whose charm endears her to Sarah.

Silver Lion for Best Director went to Jacques Audiard and his film The Sisters Brothers. It moves the audience back to Oregon in 1850s where a gold prospector is chased by the infamous duo of assassins, the Sisters brothers.

Meanwhile the famous actor Willem Dafoe was awarded the Coppa Volpi for Best Actor for the role of Vincent van Gogh in Julian Schnabel’s At Eternity’s Gate.