It’s been six years since a movie that debuted at a fall film festival won the best-picture Oscar. Now that that theory has been dispelled, do fall festivals still hold the same weight in awards season that they used to? This week on Little Gold Men, the team makes the case for why fall film festivals still matter, especially for smaller movies that need strong word of mouth to survive the season. A splashy premiere at Venice, Telluride, or Toronto can create the buzz needed to mount a successful Oscar campaign: Take, for example, Hamnet, which debuted at Telluride last year and won the top prize, the People’s Choice Award, at TIFF. “But then it gets something like the People’s Choice Award, and it feels like, okay, I have to see it.”