Toronto: ‘Green Book’ Audience Award Confirms Its Status as Major Oscar Contender

Many felt it was a fait accompli that Bradley Cooper‘s A Star Is Born would win the Toronto International Film Festival’s Grolsch People’s Choice Award — a prize, voted by the fest’s audiences, that has a long history as a harbinger of Oscar success — because, apart from being an excellent film that played like gangbusters at the event, diehard fans of the film’s leading lady, Lady Gaga, many of whom haven’t yet seen the pic, were apparently trying to game the system by voting repeatedly for it online.

But instead, the prize went to Peter Farrelly‘s Green Book, a Universal dramedy inspired by the real Civil Rights-era friendship of African-American piano virtuoso Don Shirley and his Italian-American driver Tony Lip, played by Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensson, which was directed by Farrelly — yes, the same filmmaker who co-directed Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary. Universal had under-hyped that film going into the fest, opting to keep its First Man more front and center, but Green Book‘s world-premiere screenings could not have gone over better with Toronto audiences.

Shockingly, A Star Is Born, Warner Bros. chief awards hopeful, didn’t even finish in the top three. TIFF, seemingly aware of concerns about potential voting fraud, tweeted on Saturday, “Once we receive an online vote we take many steps to ensure the submissions are legit — including checking the origin of the votes and if they are coming from ticket holders. Don’t worry, we got this.” On Sunday, TIFF’s outgoing CEO Piers Handling, asked by The Hollywood Reporter about the absence of A Star Is Born, confirmed that specific measures were taken to ensure that “no one crashed the voting process.”

In the end, the second runner-up was Alfonso Cuaron‘s black-and-white Spanish-language Netflix drama Roma; the first runner-up was Barry Jenkins‘ follow-up to his best picture Oscar winner Moonlight, the James Baldwin adaptation If Beale Street Could Talk, from Annapurna.

Both Green Book and Roma were financed by Participant Media.

Almost every one of the 40 previous recipients of Toronto’s audience-determined prize went on to some measure of recognition from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Collectively, they have accounted for 155 Oscar nominations, including 16 for best picture — 2017’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri being the most recent — and nine for best foreign-language film. Fifty-three of those nominations resulted in Oscar wins, including five for best picture: 1981’s Chariots of Fire, 1999’s American Beauty, 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire, 2010’s The King’s Speech and 2013’s 12 Years a Slave.

Handicapping the audience award is never easy, given the size of the Toronto lineup, which this year encompassed more than 250 films. According to the festival, “TIFF considers the origin of the vote and matches votes to TIFF’s ticket buyer information and database. The aim is to ensure ‘mass campaign voting’ is spotted quickly and eliminated. The winner is also based on the film that receives the highest number of votes, adjusted for the available capacity of the theater, so that all films have a chance at winning.”

Simply screening at Toronto is a win for an awards hopeful. Indeed, only one film in the past 10 years, 2014’s Birdman, won the best picture Oscar without screening at TIFF. Why might that be? Because the buzz that emanates out of Toronto (with audiences more attuned to the Academy than Venice’s and larger than Telluride’s) is heard around the world (thanks to a massive presence of international media), and thus shapes the viewing priorities of Academy members just before they are bombarded with screenings and screeners.

Additional reporting by Etan Vlessing.