HOLLYWOOD -- Like Cannes and Venice before it, the Toronto International Film Festival has come and gone for another year, and, along with it, the hopes and dreams of a number of filmmakers, actors and their breathless publicists.

As well-received movies such as Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire and Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler were basking in the glow of TIFF admiration (winning the influential People's Choice Award and Mickey Rourke a return trip to respectability, respectively), other highly-touted entries crawled home empty-handed.

For the talent and representatives concerned, it was a particularly long five-hour flight back to Los Angeles.

At stake was that crucial pre-awards season buzz -- the stuff that studios use to build those costly Oscar campaigns which, like Steven Soderbergh's two-part, 41/2-hour Che biopic, seem to go on forever.

But as even those who had proven Toronto track records discovered, lightning doesn't necessarily strike twice.

For every Juno (last year's big Festival breakout hit) there's a no-no; for every Borat (the sensation of TIFF '06), there's a dreadful bore.

For every Babel, there's a bunch of babble.

Okay, we'll stop now. Promise.

But just ask guys such as Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Alien, Thelma & Louise) and Steve Zaillian (Searching for Bobby Fischer, the Oscar-winning script for Spielberg's Schindler's List), who rode into Toronto a couple of years back with high-profile new films and the likes of Russell Crowe, Sean Penn, Jude Law and Kate Winslet starring in them.

Once the public got a gander at Scott's A Good Year and Zaillian's All the King's Men remake, the sound of no hands clapping effectively stopped both movies in their awards-season tracks.

This year was no different.

Among those films that arrived with a certain degree of expectation were Management, a romantic comedy starring Jennifer Aniston, Steve Zahn and Woody Harrelson, and The Other Man, a twisty drama from the director of Notes on a Scandal with a cast starring Liam Neeson, Antonio Banderas and Laura Linney, for crying out loud.

Both films were shot down by critics and audiences in Toronto, as were Spike Lee's messy Miracle at St. Anna and The Burning Plain, which marked the directorial debut of screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, whose written output includes 21 Grams and Babel.

Audiences got a whiff of the last one, which boasted a not-too-shabby cast headed by Charlize Theron and Kim Basinger, a week earlier in Venice, but the lacklustre TIFF reception sealed the deal.

Speaking of deals, while they didn't make quite as much noise as Slumdog and Wrestler (kinda sounds like the name of a new Stallone movie), a pair of documentaries -- Paris, Not France (as in Hilton), and More Than a Game, following a high school basketball team that included one LeBron James, had several interested buyers circling around them, boding well for their futures.

As for Management, The Other Man, the Spike Lee film and other under-achievers, crashing and burning in Toronto doesn't necessarily mean the end of the road, but lacking that crucial festival traction, the Oscars and Golden Globes are looking like iffy destinations.