Waiting for Lady Gaga in the hope of a new Oscar

The 81st edition of the Venice Film Festival is starting off under the best auspices: a mainly authorial playbill, full of great cinema signatures and newcomers, studded with a parterre of international stars - from Lady Gaga to Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Nicole Kidman, Antonio Banderas and George Clooney - to our best talents - from Alessandro Borghi to Luca Marinelli, from Barbara Bobulova to Monica Bellucci -.

It starts on Wednesday 28 with the horror-comedy Beetlejuice by Tim Burton and closes on 7 September with The American Garden by Pupi Avati. Twenty-one films in competition, including 5 Italians, 83 films in all in the various sections, under the sign of artistic director Alberto Barbera, confirmed by Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, at his "first time" on the red carpet as president of the Biennale.

Among the most eagerly awaited directors in the race will be Pedro Almodóvar making his debut with an English-language film starring Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton; Pablo Larraín with a film about the life of Maria Callas, played by Angelina Jolie; Todd Phillips bringing the sequel to Joker: Folie À Deux with Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga.

The Italian côté is also promising: Gianni Amelio directs Battlefield with Alessandro Borghi, set at the time of the Great War, and Luca Guadagnino brings Queer with Daniel Craig, based on the novel of the same name by William S. Burroughs. Fabio Grassadonia and Antonio Piazza loosely interpret the fugitive life of Matteo Messina Denaro in Iddu with Toni Servillo and Elio Germano. Among the new promises, there is Maura Delpero with Vermiglio, set in Trentino Alto Adige during the Second World War, while Giulia Louise Steigerwalt in Diva Futura tries her hand at the revolution brought about by Riccardo Schicchi (Pietro Castellitto), transforming the hippy utopia of free love into the phenomenon of porn. Out of Competition there will be room for other great masters: this year, in addition to Burton and Avati at the opening and closing of the kermesse, there will also be Bellocchio, Francesca Comencini, Costner, Diaz, Kitano, Rohrwacher. A major novelty of the Fuori Concorso is the section devoted to television series, which this year do not appear in the programme schedule as extraordinary events, but enjoy a real coronation. It is Disclaimer by Alfonso Cuarón starring Cate Blanchett, which promises to be quite scandalous. Los años nuevos by Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Sandra Romero and David Martín De Los Santos who invent ten stories for as many episodes around the same time of year: New Year's Eve. Thomas Vinterberg in Families Like Ours imagines an exceptional flood that forces Denmark to evacuate the country, placing its citizens in forced exile. And finally, Joe Wright narrates Scurati's Mussolini saga in M. Il figlio del secolo with an unrecognisable Luca Marinelli in the role of the Duce. We will talk about this news tomorrow in Domenica (on page XIII), while also tomorrow, in the newspaper, Gian Marco Committeri will talk about the new tax credit regulations and Lello Naso will interview the president of Anica, Francesco Rutelli.

"The Venice Film Festival is unique in the world, because it guarantees a very high standing, precisely because the Biennale, which includes Art, Dance, Theatre, Music, Architecture, facilitates dialogue with the other arts," Pietrangelo Buttafuoco told Il Sole 24 Ore in an interview to be published next week, in which he discusses the significance of the event, analysing the Festival's numbers. In the meantime, we anticipate some of them: there will be 13 thousand accreditations, of which 3 thousand for journalists. The budget is around 23 million euros, 16 of which are direct costs. The most important public contribution is that of the Ministry of Culture (13.5 million euros in 2022 and 2023). The Venice City Council, on the other hand, grants the availability of the premises where the Festival takes place free of charge. The Lido in recent years has been the launch pad for the Oscars, from Gravity to Poor Creatures!. We will see if it will retain its magic touch this year too.