Awards Season and the Hollywood Film Festival

In today's LA Times, Robert W. Welkos looks at the upcoming Hollywood Film Festival and its role in launching awards season in Los Angeles:

Since its inception nine years ago, the Hollywood Film Festival has emerged as one of the signature events in the Oscar award season. It wasn't completely by chance: Carlos de Abreu, the festival's founder and executive director, positioned the festival — this year it will run Tuesday through Oct. 24 — so that it would be held near the start of the campaigning for the awards season, which gets its unofficial start just after Labor Day. The Hollywood awards dinner got a boost, though, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided to move up the Oscars by a month, adding new intensity to the abbreviated awards season.