In the ’80s and ’90s, the GOP basked in an atypical rep as “the party of ideas.” Thanks to the liberal project’s distinctly dilapidated charms once Jimmy Carter got done playing the concerned mortician, the rise of deep-pocketed think tanks and often sharp-witted neocon intellectuals—and, not least, Newt Gingrich’s endlessly self-fertilizing conception of himself as a brainiac—it wasn’t even undeserved. Revealingly, though, all that froufrou stayed disconnected from the party’s popular appeal. Unlike midcentury Democrats, for whom Adlai Stevenson’s intellectualism and the New Frontier’s Harvard pedigree were pluses, the Republican base never did develop much of a taste for white meat disguised as gray matter, preferring Gingrich the hyper--partisan to Gingrich the guru every time.

Every film festival has its own customized vanity. Maybe a mite grimly, Cannes hangs on to its monopoly on glamour. It’s harder than it used to be to get big American stars to walk the red carpet—the studios no longer see much PR value in a Cannes premiere for movies they’re spending millions to open a week later stateside anyway—but the paparazzi can always make do with Johnny Hallyday in a pinch. Sundance, of course, is still the ideal place for indie filmmakers to attract notice. The New York fest gets by on whatever spurious sense of consequence is implied by its location, location, location. And these days, the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) touts itself as the place where the road to the Oscars begins.

In overdrive ever since future Best Picture winner Slumdog Millionaire’s North American premiere here four years ago—The Artist, The King’s Speech, and The Hurt Locker all did the same—this particular hype isn’t to everyone’s liking. It distorts the festival’s real calling card for cinephiles: its roster’s ecumenism, which is quite possibly unequalled by any competitor’s. But Hollywood predictably loves the rabbit’s-foot bit. No less predictably, the fest’s financial backers, both private and public—along with the likes of L’Oreal and Bell, both Ontario province and the Canadian government chip in with TIFF funding, and how civilized—are said to think the Oscar connection is just grand.