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ScottFeinberg.com contributor Mary Skawinski (@MarySkawinski) brings you the day’s most important, enjoyable, and quirky stories from around the Oscar blogosphere…

• In Contention: Kris Tapley lands in Colorado and runs through the coming attractions of the 37th annual Telluride Film Festival, which gets underway today.

• Deadline Hollywood: Pete Hammond, meanwhile, passes along a few tips about which stars will be sneaking into Telluride unannounced in his debut piece for Nikki Finke.

• The Film Experience: Robert goes long-form on French director Catherine Breillat, whose latest film “The Sleeping Beauty” will have its North American premiere at TIFF next week.

• The Projectionist: David Edelstein captures the essence of much of the awards season in a post that is short but oh so sweet.

• Hollywood-Elsewhere: Jeff Wells reports that the Boston premier of city native Ben Affleck’s newest film “The Town” will be held at Fenway Park. (Whether or not the film will be a big green monster for Warner Brothers remains to be seen.)

• The Wrap: Brent Lang wonders whether Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis‘s “Machete,” which premiered in Venice this week, can make a dent at the box office this Labor Day weekend.

• Cinematical: Pete Martin questions the importance of a film’s title when it comes to international audiences, noting recent examples of titles that “evolved” overseas.

Photo: Main street at the Telluride Film Festival. Credit: BonjourColorado.com

Since 1978, attendees of the Toronto International Film Festival have chosen the winner of an “audience award,” or, as it’s now called, the Cadillac People’s Choice Award. The winning films have almost always gone on to garner attention from the Academy — they have accounted for 93 nominations (including 9 for best picture for 9 for best foreign language film), 35 of which resulted in wins (including 3 for best picture and 5 for best foreign language film) — which has helped to cement TIFF’s reputation as the first major event of the awards season.

Here’s a look back at all of TIFF’s audience award winners and how they went on to fare at the Oscars…

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By John H. Foote, ScottFeinberg.com contributor
(and former director of the Toronto Film School)

What began as the upstart Festival of Festivals in the mid-seventies is now North America’s premier film festival and arguably the single most important film festival on the planet. This is the story of the Toronto International Film Festival…

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ScottFeinberg.com contributor Mary Skawinski (@MarySkawinski) brings you the day’s most important, enjoyable, and quirky stories from around the Oscar blogosphere…

• In Contention: Kris Tapley breaks the news that veteran Oscarologist Pete Hammond has been swiped up by Nikki Finke, who recently profiled Pete’s wife on her site.
• Awards Daily: Ryan Adams pulls quotes from some of the first “Black Swan” reviews out of Venice — most raves — but inexplicably excludes the best, Todd McCarthy‘s description of it as “‘The Red Shoes’ on acid.”
• Little Gold Men: Mike Ryan pokes fun at the not-so-many American faces in the newly-released “The American.”
• Deadline.com: Mike Fleming reports that “Precious” cutie Paula Patton will join Tom Cruise for his fourth “Mission: Impossible.”
• HitFix: Greg Ellwood notes that dragons aren’t scared of toys, as demonstrated by a recent mailer.
• Roger Ebert’s Journal: Roger Ebert reviews Glenn Beck and “radical” conservatives — and appears to settle on half a star.
• Hollywood-Elsewhere: Jeff Wells finds the one TIFF party that journalists might fight to get out of.

Photo: Mila Kunis and Natalie Portman in a scene from “Black Swan.” Credit: Fox Searchlight.

Michael Cieply‘s profile of Ben Affleck in yesterday’s New York Times notes that an unusually high number of films directed by actors will be playing at next weeks’s Toronto International Film Festival:

• Ben Affleck‘s “The Town” (Warner Brothers, 9/17, trailer)
• Clint Eastwood‘s “Hereafter” (Warner Brothers, 10/22, no trailer yet)
• Tony Goldwyn‘s “Conviction” (Fox Searchlight, 10/15, trailer)
• Philip Seymour Hoffman‘s “Jack Goes Boating” (Overture, 9/17, trailer)
• Robert Redford‘s “The Conspirator” (still seeking domestic distribution)
• David Schwimmer‘s “Trust” (still seeking domestic distribution)

This, naturally, got me thinking about the Oscar track record of films directed by actors in the best picture race and actors directing films in the best director race…

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It looks like I’ll be seeing 19 films — give or take one or two due to scheduling changes — during my fourth annual trip to the Toronto International Film Festival between the dates of September 10 and September 15. (Plus, God help me, interviews, dinners, parties, and the like.) Anyway, here’s a list that I’ll periodically update prior to my departure…

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Lee Unkrich‘s “Toy Story 3″ (Disney, 6/18, trailer) has been one of the most critically and commercially successful films of 2010 and has been mentioned as likely best picture nominee ever since its first screenings. Is it, however, really such a sure thing? I’d like to address some of the historical hurdles that it will have to overcome in order to make it into the final 10…

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Since I first started covering the annual awards seasons a decade ago, one of the most striking trends I have observed has been a marked uptick in the quantity and quality of documentary features. Each November, the Academy’s documentary branch selects 15 for a shortlist from which they ultimately pick five nominees. This year, I don’t know how they’re going to do it — Fall hasn’t even arrived yet and there are already way more than 15 worthy candidates. Frankly, I don’t think it would be going out on a huge limb to declare 2010 the strongest — or, at the very least, the deepest — year yet in the history of documentary filmmaking.

Here’s a bit of commentary on each of the docs that are registering strongest on my radar at the moment…

Now in Theaters

• “The Tillman Story” (The Weinstein Company, 8/20, trailer) — Amir Bar-Lev (“My Kid Could Paint That”) tells the true story of the man who gave up a multi-million dollar NFL contract to join the U.S. Army; who was killed in Iraq in 2004; whose “heroic” death the Bush Administration tried to use to increase public support for the war; but whose family — most of whom granted interviews for the film — ultimately discovered that the true manner in which he had been killed had been buried as part of a cover-up that led directly to the highest reaches of the military and government.

• “A Film Unfinished” (Oscilloscope, 8/18, trailer) — The object of recents raves in Entertainment Weekly and the New York Times, Yael Hersonski‘s doc deconstructs “Das Ghetto,” a Nazi propaganda film of Jewish life in the Warsaw Ghetto that was shot in 1942, and which for 40 years was considered to be unmanipulated footage until another reel was discovered and exposes it as anything but that. The most powerful part of this multi-faceted effort to set the record straight: testimony from five Holocaust survivors who lived in the ghetto, as well as one of the cameramen who filmed it.

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Alexandre Aja‘s new horror flick “Piranha 3D” (Dimension Films, 8/20, trailer), the second remake of a 1978 film of the same name, opened last weekend to middling box office despite a creative studio publicity campaign that preemptively embraced the notion that the film is so bad it’s actually good — there was, for instance, a fake “For Your Oscar Consideration” video and a mock Oscar acceptance video on “Funny or Die.”

To me, though, the primary — and perhaps only — reason to see the film is Elisabeth Shue, who stars as Sheriff Julie Forester in the film (which also features Jessica Szhor, Adam Scott, Kelly Brooks, Richard Dreyfuss, Jerry O’Connell, Christopher Lloyd, Ving Rhames, Dina Meyer, Cody Longo, Ricardo Antonio Chavira, Paul Scheer, and Eli Roth). Shue, who received a best actress Oscar nomination for “Leaving Las Vegas” (1995), has been grossly underused and misued over the 15 years since, but can still make even the biggest piece of shlock — which this film may well be — seem somewhat redeemable.

In April of 2009, I sat down with Shue in New York for an extensive chat about her life and work. Here is an interesting excerpt that sheds some light on the trials and travails faced by talented actresses as they hit middle-age and/or try to start a family…

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