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Even in the crowded marketplace of fall film festivals, the Toronto International Film Festival stands out. The Telluride film festival has had the hot hand with Best Picture Oscar contenders the last few years, but that one’s all sequestered in its mountain resort, too financially insurmountable for anyone besides industry elites and hand-picked press. Venice is prestigious and discerning but can feel like Cannes-lite. The New York Film Festival will program some heavy hitters, but stretched out over the span of a month, it never really feels like a festival in the truest sense of the word.

Not Toronto, though. With nearly 400 films packed into ten days among the world’s most polite set of volunteers, the Toronto International Film Festival—TIFF, for short—still manages to assert its relevance by sheer size. It may not have the market cornered on world premieres like it used to, but it still offers up a buffet for film lovers to scarf down like so much poutine.

Last year, TIFF was a crucial boost for the awards-season runs of (eventual Oscar winner) Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones (The Theory of Everything), Benedict Cumberbatch (The Imitation Game), Reese Witherspoon (Wild), Julianne Moore (Still Alice), JK Simmons (Whiplash), and Jake Gyllenhaal (Nightcrawler). (And don’t forget Robert Duvall in The Judge! Never forget.) This year isn’t lacking in contenders, either. We’ve picked a dozen that are most likely to emerge from TIFF as the talk of the festival.

Eddie Redmayne ('The Danish Girl') and Julianne Moore ('Freeheld')

Last year’s Best Actor and Best Actress winners both premiered their respective films The Theory of Everything and Still Alice at Toronto last year and rode them all the way to the Oscar stage. They’re both back this year, Redmayne as transgender pioneer Lili Elbe in The Danish Girl and Moore as a lesbian cop in Freeheld (and as one third of a love triangle with Greta Gerwig and Ethan Hawke in Maggie Plan). Redmayne is already getting raves for The Danish Girl after it screened in Venice, with people wondering if he could be the first Best Actor winner to repeat since Tom Hanks did it in 1994.

Sandra Bullock, 'Our Brand Is Crisis'

Since winning the Oscar for The Blind Side, Bullock has only made five feature films. We don’t need to talk about Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. But in 2013 she had a monster comedy hit with The Heat and then a monster dramatic hit (and another Oscar nod) with Gravity. This year, she was a featured voice in the inexplicable blockbuster Minions. Perhaps she can double up again as the lead in David Gordon Green’s Our Brand Is Crisis, which looks to be a darkly comedic look at American meddling in South American electoral politics. The trailer has a Wag the Dog-ish feel, which: we should all be so lucky.

Tom Hiddleston, 'I Saw the Light'

The cynical way to look at this is that Hiddleston is playing a real-life music star — in this case, country legend Hank Williams — and the Oscars can’t get enough of actors playing real people. But if you’ve seen enough from Hiddleston in the Marvel movies and smaller stuff like The Deep Blue Sea and Only Lovers Left Alive to to get excited about what he can do, TIFF 2015 gives you Oscar-bait like I Saw the Light AND High-Rise from tricksy Brit director Ben Wheatley (Kill List; A Field in England).

Brie Larson, 'Room'

Larson’s star has been on the rise for a while, as she’s toggled between mainstream comedy (21 Jump Street; Trainwreck) and movies with smaller but more vociferous devotees (Scott Pilgrim vs. The World). Two years ago, she nearly had a breakthrough with the critically lauded Short Term 12. She’s already getting awed reviews for Room after its Telluride premiere. The adaptation of Emma Donoghue’s novel about a mother and child kept away in a locked room comes to Toronto with some big expectations.

Idris Elba, 'Beasts of No Nation'

Director Cary Fukunaga is getting the lion’s share of the buzz for this one, since it’s his first project since his mega-acclaimed directing of the first season of True Detective. But our once and future Should Be James Bond has got to get his big movie breakthrough some time, right? Why not as a warlord leading child soldiers in Africa in this sure-to-be-harrowing release from Netflix films?

Michael Keaton, 'Spotlight'

Keaton came oh so close to winning the Oscar last year for Birdman, but fell just short. But comebacks are a great thing, and so here he is with another well-pedigreed crack at the statue. Before this year’s dud The Cobbler (which screened to zero fanfare at TIFF last year), director Tom McCarthy had a perfect record of mid-sized indie successes, from The Station Agent to The Visitor to Win Win. Spotlight is his starriest and most dramatically portentous film yet, with Keaton and an all-star team (Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams, Liev Schrieber) as journalists investigating the Boston Catholic church sex scandals.

Matt Damon, 'The Martian'

Ridley Scott keeps trying, man. Body of Lies, Robin Hood, Prometheus, The Counselor, they’ve all looked good on paper. Some of them even looked great as trailers. None of them ended up satisfying audiences the way his best films (Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise) have done. With The Martian, Scott is hoping he can ride the performance of Matt Damon to his first real success since American Gangster. Damon will certainly have the platform, as an astronaut left stranded on Mars.

Ben Foster, 'The Program'

Ben Foster has been one of our most interesting actors for a while now. 3:10 to Yuma, The Messenger, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, all prize-worthy performances of one vintage or another. In The Program, he stars for director Stephen Frears as notorious cycling cheater Lance Armstrong. Biopics aren’t always the most exciting, but a biopic where the protagonist is disliked enough that there’s no mandate to lionize sounds exciting, and Foster seems like an incredibly intriguing actor to hand a merciless assignment like that, should Frears want it. Frears directed Judi Dench to a nomination for Philomena not long ago. He’s got the touch when he wants to.

Nicholas Hoult, 'Kill Your Friends'

Hoult is having a fantastic year with an acclaimed turn in Mad Max: Fury Road, and he could compound that by grabbing some attention for Kill Your Friends, which looks like a brash and excessive spin through the business end of Britpop, which frankly sounds amazing. (Also encouraging: director Owen Harris was responsible for that excellent episode of Black Mirror with Domhnall Gleeson and Hayley Atwell.)

Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford, 'Truth'

Robert Redford and Cate Blanchett, 'Truth' — Photo: Sony Pictures Classics

The real truth is that Blanchett’s awards-season hopes are almost fully resting on Todd Haynes’ Carol, which has bypassed TIFF en route to New York. But it’s still tough to turn one’s nose up at Blanchett and Redford going toe to toe as Dan Rather as his news producer, all directed by the screenwriter of Zodiac.