The Best Actor race, for all intents and purposes, ended a year ago at the Toronto International Film Festival as soon as the international film community got one look at Jamie Foxx as Ray Charles in "Ray." At that moment, it was all but over for everyone else. He had not only done something difficult and unlikely - convinced everyone that, for dramatic purposes, he was a universally beloved and familiar American icon - he had done it with power and impact.

History could be on its way to repeating itself at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, beginning Thursday. Sometime in the course of it, the international film community will get its first look at Joaquin Phoenix as Johnny Cash in James Mangold’s "Walk the Line." (Reese Witherspoon plays June Carter Cash.)

2005-2006 is the season of Johnny Cash. As we speak, Studio Arena Theatre is in previews for Richard Maltby Jr.’s "Ring of Fire," the Cash musical that will eventually go to Broadway. Whether or not Joaquin Phoenix as the Man in Black blows everyone away (to state it crudely but frankly) as much as Jamie Foxx did with "Ray" will be known before the 30th annual Toronto Film Festival ends on Sept. 17.

And that is only one of many dozens of major plots going into what is now, arguably, the greatest film festival in the world.

Cannes certainly has seniority. It is still, hands down, the greatest of all international meetings of the world film community (produers, filmmakers, buyers, distributors, exhibitors, press), but Toronto may have superseded it as the glorious film supermarket that brings that community together with film-mad PEOPLE, the movie-besotted civilians who are forcing movies to remain exciting.

Seldom before, in fact, has a Toronto Film Festival been as needed as it is in 2005.

After a summer of shocking and truly stunning American big studio mediocrity and ineptitude, here is the event that confirms that the greatest art form of the 20th century is vigorous and flourishing in the 21st.

Just as the modern supermarket has become a place to buy milk, turkey burgers and tomatoes as well as designer water, salad dressings and jams from tiny mom-and-pop operations and aisles and aisles of exotic foodstuffs from around the world, so too has the Toronto festival become a film supermarket. It’s a showcase for the best in English-language film commerce at the same time that it is an impossibly vast international film emporium and one of the world’s greatest museums of film culture at its most high-dome.

No matter what happens before or during it - 9/11, the SARS outbreak - it just soldiers on by presenting film on all levels (high, low and middle) to an audience that includes everyone from the most serious cinema scholars to the most guileless velvet rope gawkers.

It is a Big Film fall showcase, a place where the world will get early looks at Tim Burton’s "The Corpse Bride," Cameron Crowe’s "Elizabethtown," Anand Tucker’s version of Steve Martin’s novel "Shopgirl" starring Claire Danes, Scorsese’s Bob Dylan film for PBS, "No Direction Home." But at the same time it is the kind of global cinematheque that finds equal (or greater) pleasure in celebrating the career of murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, Mary Harron’s "The Notorious Bettie Page" (starring Gretchen Mol as the legendary ’50s pinup) and visionary film mandarin Matthew Barney’s "Drawing Restraint 9."

Those who treasure the occasional brush with fame in a celebrity-centric world have the opportunity to see (or even bump into at a restaurant or Yorkville drug store) all of these among this year’s 500 expected guests:

Kevin Bacon, Alec Baldwin, Maria Bello, Annette Bening, Juliette Binoche, Cate Blanchett, Helena Bonham Carter, David Boreanaz, Jeff Bridges, Pierce Brosnan, Genevieve Bujold, Gabriel Byrne, Nick Cave, Jackie Chan, Tommy Chong, LL Cool J, Billy Crudup, Vincent D’Onofrio, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels, Cameron Diaz, Robert Downey Jr., Kirsten Dunst, Sam Elliott, Ralph Fiennes, Morgan Freeman, Richard Gere, Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal, Cuba Gooding Jr., Anne Hathaway, William H. Macy, Tommy Lee Jones, Anthony Hopkins, Bob Hoskins, William Hurt, Val Kilmer, Greg Kinnear, Shirley MacLaine, Frances McDormand, Liza Minnelli, Gretchen Mol, Julianne Moore, Viggo Mortensen, Liam Neeson, Cynthia Nixon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cillian Murphy, Brittany Murphy, Keanu Reeves, Charlotte Rampling, Isabella Rossellini, Kurt Russell, Kiefer Sutherland, Justin Timberlake, Emily Watson, Michelle Williams and Reese Witherspoon.

Put it this way: among the population of the thousands who will throng to the Toronto International Film Festival next week, there will be many cynics. They will, however, be in the vast minority - which is probably what makes the Toronto Film Festival unique in the known film world.

A vast number of films arrives in Toronto this year with almost equally vast expectations. Among them:

• "Edison" by David J. Burke: Is the world ready for Justin Timberlake as "a naive but ambitious journalist" in a thriller. It will soon find out. A cop and reporter tale, with LL Cool J, Kevin Spacey and Morgan Freeman.

• "Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" by Nick Park and Steve Box. The much-loved claymatian duo enters the world of "veggie-mania" before the Giant Vegetable Competition. Ralph Fiennes and Helena Bonham Carter are among those supplying the voices.

• "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada" by Tommy Lee Jones. The crusty actor’s directorial debut was a major prize winner at Cannes. With Barry Pepper and Dwight Yoakam.

• "Dave Chappelle’s Rock Party" by Michel Gondry. The director of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" gives us what happened when the reluctant and troubled TV comic partied down with Mos Def, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, the Roots and other friends.

• "Capote" by Bennett Miller. Philip Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote. Enough said. (If it isn’t, Catherine Keener plays his friend from boyhood, Harper Lee, author of "To Kill a Mockingbird.")

• "Trust the Man" by Bart Freundlich. Domestic comedy in which Julianne Moore works for her director husband (with Billy Crudup, Maggie Gyllenhaal and David Duchovny).

• "Oliver Twist" by Roman Polanski. Polanski’s history with adapted classics is uncommonly good (see "Tess") despite the controversial cinematic history of Dickens’ Fagin (played here by Ben Kingsley).

• "Revolver" by Guy Ritche. The newest from Madonna’s underworld-loving husband. With Ray Liotta, Vincent Pastore and Andre Benjamin.

• "American Gun" by Aric Avelino, Donald Sutherland, Forest Whitaker and Marcia Gay Harden in an interwoven story line similar to "Crash."

• "All Souls." Filmmakers react to the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh. His final film, "06/05, The Sixth of May," will also be shown.

• "Transamerica" by Duncan Tucker. Felicity Huffman in a much-praised performance in the transgender tale that was the most controversial film of the Tribeca Film Festival.

• "A History of Violence" by David Cronenberg. One of the festival’s most eagerly awaited films, starring Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, William Hurt and Ed Harris in a thriller based on a well-known graphic novel.

• "North Country" by Nicki Caro. Charlize Theron tries to do a "Norma Rae." With Sissy Spacek, Frances McDormand, Woody Harrelson and Richard Jenkins.

• "Breakfast on Pluto" by Neil Jordan. Cillian Murphy, Liam Neeson and Stephen Rea in the life of transvestite Patrick Braden based on a novel by horror specialist Patrick McCabe.

• "Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story" by Michael Winterbottom. A rare and brave attempt to make a film out of one of the least adaptable of all literary masterpieces, Laurence Sterne’s "Tristram Shandy." It stars Steve Coogan, Jeremy Northam, Gillian Anderson and Stephen Fry.

• "Bubble" by Stephen Soderberg. No stars, just nonprofessionals in a tale of a struggling doll factory. No one ever said Soderberg was in it just for the money (see "Oceans 11" and "Oceans 12").

• "Everything Is Illuminated" by Liev Schreiber. The long-awaited version of Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel starring Elijah Wood.

• "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" by Shane Black. Robert Downey Jr. and Val Kilmer in an action comedy drama from the man who gave us, yes, "Lethal Weapon." (The title was once the title of a collection of Pauline Kael reviews that she took from an Italian movie poster.)

• "Romance and Cigarettes" by John Turturro. The great character actor directs James Gandolfini, Susan Sarandon and Kate Winslet as a love triangle (no kidding). With Mandy Moore, Mary-Louise Parker and Christopher Walken.

• "Elizabethtown" by Cameron Crowe. One of the year’s most eagerly awaited commercial films. Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst in a comedy about a man going back home to Kentucky after the death of his father. Tom Cruise co-produced. There’s no word on whether or not it ends with Bloom jumping on top of the couch.