The twin Canadian military tanks set up outside the Liberty Grand Entertainment Complex for TIFF’s opening-night party – a nod to the screening of Paul Gross’ epic WWI movie Passchendaele – provided an apt metaphor for a festival under siege.

First there was a call to arms from Venice, which next year promises to park on Toronto’s dates to win back major Hollywood movies.

Then, Toronto Sun film critic Bruce Kirkland, a longtime TIFF insider, turned on the festival for letting fat-cat donors go to the front of the line at Roy Thomson Hall on opening night, while ordinary Torontonians holding passes for possible tickets were left out in the cold.

Under the front-page headline ‘Toronto Filmfest a Farce,’ Kirkland declared TIFF was no longer the people’s festival, and instead ‘an elitist corporate spectacle.’

TIFF Group CEO Piers Handling, in the same Toronto Sun pages, defended corporate support as essential for TIFF in an era of government cuts.

‘Donors are given preference to get into two cinemas: the Roy Thomson Hall and the Elgin. Preference is probably the wrong word. They are given their own lineup,’ Handling explained.

All of which underlines how celebrity has replaced national cinema as the new currency at TIFF.

The A-list stars rolling through Toronto on the festival’s first weekend were more likely to pop into luxury lounges to be photographed next to brand labels than contribute to roundtable discussions about the potential and pitfalls of global cinema.

And in among the star-struck hordes chasing Hollywood actors was a sycophantic local press more intent on playing Oscar soothsayers than being legitimate film writers.

The unbearable lightness of TIFF was also evidenced in its festival lineup – actually considered by many as possibly the best in years.

Opening with Paul Gross’ Passchendaele, expected to receive a wide domestic release in October, TIFF has hosted a multitude of uplifting fare this September, in contrast to last year, when many political and war-themed movies arrived to critical fanfare and bidding wars, before most went on to bomb at the box office.

This year, by contrast, popular fare including Christophe Barratier’s French drama Faubourg 36, which opened Montreal’s World Film Festival, Kevin Smith’s Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Yannis Smaragdis’ El Greco – Greece’s biggest-ever-budgeted movie, about the famed painter – and Venice winner The Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky’s portrait of a wrestler’s last push for glory, filled TIFF theaters with applause and buyers with dreams of commercial success.

These and a raft of other titles at TIFF impressed critics, but were more likely to leave cinemagoers dabbing their eyes than questioning personal values or beliefs.

TIFF’s increasingly commercial and corporate glow was also evidenced on the party scene. Here, international distributors – looking to reduce their movie launch costs and Canadian broadcasters looking to leverage the festival’s star wattage for TV eyeballs, had CTV and Canwest hosting a series of glitzy after-parties.

As TIFF increasingly provides a venue for Hollywood’s fall movie press tour, CTV hosted a blowout for Miramax’s Blindness at its neo-gothic headquarters at Queen and John Streets, while Canwest unrolled the red carpet for the Liam Neeson-starrer The Other Man, Atom Egoyan’s Adoration – picked up prior to the fest by Sony Pictures Classics – and Kari Skogland’s Fifty Dead Men Walking.

‘The studios are trying to be sure they have their feature films showcased in the right places to get the right audiences, and distributors want to ensure the films are launched in the best way possible,’ Canwest Mediaworks SVP of programming and production Barb Williams says of the strategy to pick up the tab for movie after-parties in return for glam footage on ET Canada.

If anything, clever use of marketing relationships has meant that corporate sponsors such as Audi and Moët & Chandon champagne have in fact largely underwritten the glitzy affairs.

Canwest started the Canadian network rush to stage TIFF after-parties two years ago with the Away from Her bash at Harry Rosen.

Previously, broadcasters staged televised TIFF parties – most notably Citytv’s Festival Schmooze – to spotlight one whole evening, not just one film.

This year, CTV is taking a slightly different tack with its fest parties by putting the focus on big events thrown open to ordinary Torontonians.

‘Yes, there’s industry people, but it’s exciting to allow Torontonians to get that close to the stars and to the festival,’ explains Jordan Schwartz, SVP and GM of CTV’s entertainment group.

In addition to the Blindness party, CTV hosted a few fashion shows and other events to drive partygoers to its downtown HQ as well as eyeballs to its eTalk broadcasts, and reveled in the endless stream of stars and starlets that graced its red carpets through the opening weekend.

So it’s grab as grab can at TIFF during these gloriously glitzy and glamorous times, and devil take the hindmost. It’s gawk and get giddy over the galas and the loot bags and good luck to any Nigerian or Filipino auteur coming to Toronto in search of attention and acquisition dollars.