It’s been six years since a movie that debuted at a fall film festival won the best-picture Oscar. Instead, the past few seasons have seen big studio movies like One Battle After Another or Oppenheimer make it to the Oscar stage without visiting any of the major festivals, while the movies that have emerged from the festival circuit have come from events earlier in the year—like Anora’s trip to Cannes or Everything Everywhere All at Once’s SXSW debut.

For a long time, it’s been a firmly held industry belief that releasing your film too early in the year means mounting an Oscar campaign that will be too long, too arduous, and too expensive to pay off. Now that that theory has been dispelled, do fall festivals still hold the same weight in awards season that they used to?

In short: yes. This week on Little Gold Men, the team makes the case for why fall film festivals still matter, especially for smaller movies that need strong word of mouth to survive the season. A splashy premiere at Venice, Telluride, or Toronto can create the buzz needed to mount a successful Oscar campaign: Take, for example, Hamnet, which debuted at Telluride last year and won the top prize, the People’s Choice Award, at TIFF.

“Even though Hamnet had a lot of prestige…it needed that push to the general audience because people were like, ‘I don’t know if I wanna see it. It sounds so sad,’” says John Ross. “But then it gets something like the People’s Choice Award, and it feels like, okay, I have to see it.” Hamnet wound up getting nominated for eight Oscars and winning one, for best actress.

Now that the lineups for Venice and TIFF have been unveiled—the lineup for fall’s third heavy-hitter festival, Telluride, is traditionally not released until right before the festival starts—the Little Gold Men team also takes a guess at which films might be this year’s most promising debuts. We start with two of Venice’s most anticipated premieres, a pair of based-on-a-true story movies: Danny Boyle’s Ink, which stars Guy Pearce as Rupert Murdoch, and Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime, about the investigative news show To Catch a Predator, starring Robert Pattinson as host Chris Hansen.