WINNING two major prizes at the Venice Film Festival last Saturday night is, in the first place, a highly prestigious victory for the Irish writer director Neil Jordan.
He received the supreme award, the Golden Lion, for Michael Collins, and Liam Neeson was voted best actor by the Venice jury for his performance in the film's title role.
After Cannes, Venice is the most important competitive film festival, and to receive two principal prizes, including best film, at a high profile event which generally spreads its awards more evenly among the entries is a remarkable achievement in itself.
However, in the case of Michael Collins, the double victory at Venice is meaningful in other respects. It sends the first clear signal to the Academy Award voters in the United States that here is a film that merits serious consideration when it comes to balloting the Academy's electorate in advance of the Oscars ceremony next spring.
The Venice awards single out Michael Collins at a crucial time when many of the most prominent Oscar contenders are about to go on release in the US. This is expected to be a year when a formidable field of contenders will be vying for Oscars.
Even more importantly for Warner Bros at this point, the Venice awards bring considerable respectability to a film which the studio has been noticeably nervous about releasing. Michael Collins is one of a number of movies which were given the production green light during the IRA ceasefire and now face going into release at a politically sensitive time after the collapse of that ceasefire.
Warner Bros must be relieved now to be in the position of releasing Michael Collins as something much more than a politically contentious film - which is how it had been perceived before its world premiere at Venice nine days ago - now that it can be marketed as an international award winner.
This will go some distance towards deflecting the advance criticisms of the film's alleged political agenda, even if most of those criticisms emanated from commentators who had not seen the film.
The positive response to Michael Collins from the world media at Venice, some of which represented complete U turns from critics who had attacked the film before seeing it has given Warner Bros the encouragement to bring the film's release in Ireland and Britain forward from early in the new year to the end of next month, very soon after the film's US release on October 11th.
With the Venice awards in the bag, the attention shifts to Canada this week, when Michael Collins has its North American premiere at the high profile and non competitive Toronto International Film Festival.
The film already has come under fire in Canada's Financial Post, in which the columnist Michael Coren last week branded Jordan's film "two hours of sheer lies". He wrote that "the obvious targets of the film are naive members of the Irish American community, who in the past have given money to murder gangs in Ireland."
But Neil Jordan and his producers will be hoping that, after Venice, a strong response to Michael Collins in Toronto will help to consolidate the North American prospects for a film that is seen as difficult to market because of its historical complexity.