Hello and welcome to Little Gold Men, the award season podcast from Vanity Fair.

I am delighted and proud to introduce him as Academy Award winner.

And the Oscar goes to.

And the Oscar goes to the winner. It's a tie.

And any little girl who's practicing their speech on the telly, you never know.

Mom, I just want an Oscar.

I am Katie Rich. I'm here by myself today because I have this week's interview with Cameron Bailey, the CEO of TIFF.

He is the great mastermind of the Toronto International Film Festival, which kicks off this week.

And when I spoke to him, I was kind of anticipating him running from place to place constantly.

As I would imagine for the head of TIFF, but as he said, there are many people who work that organization to keep him from having to deal with little problems.

So he gets to talk to me about the big picture of this festival, which obviously is having an interesting year with the ongoing SAG after a WGA strikes.

As Cameron told me, he got kind of deeply involved in labor law in a way he never expected to, you know, see who could come to the festival in what capacity.

But they've put together an incredible lineup as usual.

And he has a real passion for the international aspect of the festival, which takes up so much of it, 70% of the titles at TIFF are from outside the US.

And there's some incredible ones on the lineup.

We talked about those. We talked about how he got into working as a film programmer in the first place, which I think is completely fascinating.

And he made some predictions about the movies that people are going to come out of TIFF talking about, which of course you'll hear us talking about in our own podcast after the festival.

So to set up our coverage of TIFF and to give you a sense of what's ahead, here is my conversation with the CEO of TIFF, Cameron Bailey.

Well, I'm so happy to welcome Cameron Bailey, the CEO of TIFF.

We are speaking on the Friday before TIFF begins. People will be listening to this on Tuesday.

What's your life like in these days leading up to TIFF? I kind of can't wrap my head around how busy you might be right now.

You know, the busiest part is actually before this. If we were busy in the few days right before the festival in this kind of way, it would probably be a bad sign.

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