[My Past Post on Correlation Between International Film Festivals and Correlations to The Oscars in The Past Decade](https://www.reddit.com/r/oscarrace/comments/1ng8s0j/major_international_film_festivals_and/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)

EDIT: Noticed massive typo for CODA.  Sorry!  Note that the awards won at Sundance are U.S. Dramatic (Jury), U.S. Dramatic (Audience), and Special Jury Prize for Best Ensemble Cast

Hey everyone!  About half a year ago, I made a post trying to find the correlation between the biggest international film festivals (Sundance, Berlin, Cannes, Venice, Telluride, and Toronto) and their correlation to Oscar noms and wins.  Now that this year's Sundance and Berlin just happened, I thought it could be worth thinking a bit ahead to next year's Oscars and seeing how much they could correlate with the next year.

To read the chart, the legend is that blue indicates the film was in competition for the main jury, green means the film premiered Out of Competition.  One of these films, The Ugly Stepsister, premiered in Sundance's Midnight selection, so I colored that in red.  I love documentaries but decided to not include them for this, if that is fine with people, just because the way documentaries become Oscar contenders versus narrative movies tend to be quite different, so I thought made more sense.

The general takeaways?

**Sundance**

* Movies that premiere at Sundance strangely perform better at the Oscars when they premiere out of competition. Why this is the case is kinda baffling to me, and I'm not sure why since you'd expect it to be the opposite, but this may be informative for us to keep in mind for future Sundance Film Festivals alongside this year's lineup. If a movie premieres out of competition there from now on, it wouldn't necessarily be a sign of concern in terms of its awards prospects.
* That said, Josephine recently winning both the Sundance Jury and Audience for U.S. Dramatic is a huge deal.  In Sundance's entire run, Josephine is actually only the third movie to pull this off (the other two were Minari and CODA).  The only concern is can Sumerian, the place that decided will distribute it, handle an Oscar campaign?  Unfortunately, I'd have to guess they can't just because they are so new, and they likely will need to develop a campaigning plan over the next few years to see what happens, but we will never know until we see what happens.

**Berlin**

* Berlin International Film Festival is pretty hit-or-miss in terms of if they correlate with the Oscars. They do correlate from time to time but not as often as you'd expect.  That said, they have been the premiere for some Oscar contenders in recent years, such as No Other Land, The Quiet Girl, A Fantastic Woman, The Teachers' Lounge, Isle of Dogs, and On Body and Soul.
* That said, they had a good correlation with the Oscars this year with both Blue Moon and If I Had Legs I'd Kick You becoming Oscar contenders!
* Given Sandra Hüller's win here this year alongside her being a former Oscar nominee, we may see Rose become an Oscar contender if a good distributor picks that movie up.
* Yellow Letters could become an Oscar contender due to it winning Golden Bear (alongside The Teachers' Lounge, Çatak's previous movie, being an Oscar nominee).  However, its current RT and Metacritic scores are not as high as most Oscar nominees (70% and 66 respectively).  If this trend holds when more people see it, that could be damaging for the movie's awards prospects.  The movie will also likely need a strong distributor in the U.S.  The Teachers' Lounge was distributed by Sony Pictures Classics.

While this post is primarily about Sundance and Berlin, I do think it's worth noting that it seems the other four major festivals, Cannes, Telluride, Toronto, and Venice, all have stronger correlations with the Oscars than Sundance and Berlin.  This doesn't mean we should disregard Sundance or Berlin in relation to the Oscars, but to wait till those festivals to really get a better sense of what may became an Oscar contender.

Hope this helps with people's predicting, enjoy!

Stats for the Correlation between Sundance/Berlin Film Festival and Oscar Noms/Wins