Venice Film Festival draws to a close and will announce its awards, which can give an Oscars boost

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VENICE, Italy (AP) — The 82nd Venice Film Festival is coming to a close Saturday as its juries make final choices for the awards. The prizes, including nods for acting, directing and best picture, called the Golden Lion, will be handed out during an evening ceremony.

This year’s competition lineup included many possible Oscar heavyweights. Kathryn Bigelow set off a warning shot about nuclear weapons and the apparatus of decision-making with her urgent, and distressingly realistic, thriller “A House of Dynamite.”

Guillermo del Toro unveiled his “Frankenstein,” a sumptuously gothic interpretation of the Mary Shelley classic, with Oscar Isaac portraying Victor Frankenstein as a romantic madman and Jacob Elodri, naive and raw, as the monster.

Park Chan-wook delighted with his darkly comedic “No Other Choice,” a satire about the desperation of white-collar workers competing for jobs.

Dwayne Johnson took a serious turn as a fighter grappling with addiction to painkillers and winner in the MMA/UFC sports drama “The Smashing Machine,” while Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons are strange and fierce as kidnapped and kidnapper in Yorgos Lanthimos’s provocative “Bugonia.”

George Clooney and Adam Sandler moved audiences as an aging movie star and his devoted manager on a soul-searching journey through Europe in “Jay Kelly,” a ruthlessly truthful love letter to Hollywood, in all its ridiculousness and beauty.

Jude Law furrowed his brows as Vladimir Putin in “The Wizard of the Kremlin” and Amanda Seyfried put a human, feminist, face to the religious sect the shakers in “The Testament of Ann Lee.”

Julia Roberts also flexed her acting muscles as a Yale philosophy professor in the midst of a misconduct accusation against a colleague in “After the Hunt,” but neither she nor her castmates Andrew Garfield, Ayo Edebiri and director, Luca Guadagnino, are eligible for Venice prizes. The film debuted out of competition.

Far from Hollywood, Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, had a late-festival smash with “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” about the 6-year-old girl killed in Gaza, which reportedly got a 22-minute standing ovation. The film is a shattering document of the Israel-Hamas war, set entirely inside the dispatch center of the Palestine Red Crescent Society rescue service. It uses the real audio of Hind’s call, while actors portray the first responders.

“Nebraska” filmmaker Alexander Payne presided over the main competition jury, which included Brazilian actor Fernanda Torres, Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof, French director Stéphane Brizé, Italian director Maura Delpero, Chinese actor Zhao Tao and Romanian director Cristian Mungiu.

Both Lanthimos and del Toro have won the Golden Lion before, for “Poor Things” and “The Shape of Water,” respectively. Those films also went on to win top Oscars, including best actress for Stone in “Poor Things,” and best picture and director for del Toro’s “The Shape of Water.”

Since 2014, the Venice Film Festival has hosted four best picture winners, including “The Shape of Water,” “Birdman,” “Spotlight" and “Nomadland.” Last year, they had several eventual Oscar-winning films in the lineup, including Brady Corbet’s “The Brutalist,” which won three including best actor for Adrien Brody, Walter Salles’ best international feature winner “I’m Still Here,” and the animated short “In the Shadow of the Cypress.”

The previous Golden Lion winner, Pedro Almodóvar’s English-language debut “The Room Next Door,” a smash at Venice with an 18-minute standing ovation, received no Oscar nominations.

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