The European film festivals have never been able to challenge Toronto when it comes to sheer wall-to-wall Tinsel-town wattage. Ever since the splashy Canadian debut of American Beauty in 1999, which subsequently reaped multiple Academy Awards, the city’s international film festival has been used by the major studios as a launch point for their pivotal North American Oscar campaigns. Thus, at the end of each summer, whips are cracked, Beverly Hills mansions are emptied and Malibu and Santa Monica decamp to the blustery borders of Lake Ontario.

This year was no different. Brad Pitt, Adrien Brody, Antonio Banderas, Edward Norton, Jennifer Anniston, Julianne Moore, Renée Zellweger, etc, were all paraded along the red carpets, and then dutifully marched through press conferences and TV junkets. And yet, for all its ostensible glamour, the onslaught of this year’s Alist ensemble was strangely underwhelming.

The movies themselves were partly to blame. With no instant classics such as There Will Be Blood or Brokeback Mountain to champion, the festival served up solid, entertaining, yet uninspiring main-stream fare, such as the Ed Harris western Appaloosa, the Dakota Fanning tear-jerker The Secret Life of Bees and the gritty cop drama Pride and Glory. The latter movie features a standout turn from Colin Farrell as a dirty New York cop, a man so deranged that he’d torture a newborn baby with a steam iron to cover his own double-dealing tracks. It’s tough stuff, but it’s hardly going to set the movie world alight.

Spike Lee unspooled his long-cherished Second World War movie Miracle at St Anna. The film, about African-American “Buffalo Soldiers” fighting in Italy, was seen as a riposte to Clint Eastwood (maker of the blackless Flags of Our Fathers) and to five decades of similar epics. It is long, and sprinkled with provocative argument, some nice battle scenes and lots of boring bits. Better by far was the press conference, in which Lee made a spine-tingling speech that connected the sacrifices of the Buffalo Soldiers to the potential triumph that awaits Barack Obama in November.

Elsewhere, though, the lack of inspiration was grinding, and pointed to something mechanical and lifeless in the way the studios had colonised the festival. The city’s two prestige hotels (the Intercontinental and the Four Seasons) had become veritable interview factories, feeding throngs of journalists down soundbite production lines, snatching well-worn promotional guff and marketing platitudes from dazed A-listers. And then, just when it seemed that Toronto had lost all credibility, something astounding happened – the Blist arrived and saved the day.

Mickey Rourke lit up the festival like a punch-drunk Christmas tree with The Wrestler, his soulful drama about a faded grappler looking for respect in his twilight years. At the movie’s premiere, Rourke sweetly joined his director Darren Aronofksy and audience members, including Marilyn Manson, in a chorus of Happy Birthday for his just-turned 21-year-old co-star Evan Rachel Wood (also Manson’s current squeeze).

Even better than The Wrestler, however, was JCVD, a triumphant return to form (although he never really had a “form” in the first place) for Jean-Claude Van Damme. The movie stars Van Damme as a jaded Blist action hero called Jean-Claude Van Damme who returns to his native Belgium after losing his daughter in a custody battle but then gets trapped in a postoffice robbery. It’s trippy stuff, like Being John Malkovich meets Hard Target. And Van Damme gives a performance that is witty, fragile and – don’t laugh – mesmerising.

Finally, the biggest Blister of them all, Paris Hilton, put her own definitive stamp on the festival by suddenly arriving, 11th-hour style, to support the fly-on-the-wall documentary Paris, Not France, despite earlier publicised rumours of her private disapproval and threats of legal action.

She needn’t have worried. The film, an all-access look at life inside the Hilton circus, is directed by Adria Petty (daughter of the rock singer Tom), and paints a complex and fascinating portrait of Paris who, it transpires (though most of us had already guessed), has created entirely the fake persona of a bimbo blonde in order to sustain a multimillion-dollar brand.

On stage, after the premiere, Petty thanked Hilton for opening up, “and giving me more than just fluff”. And yet the film left you with the impression that Hilton was fundamentally unhappy with her own creation, and her permanently hounded lifestyle, and her derided Blist status. It could have been worse, though. She could have been A-list.

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