A festival crowd in Toronto just picked your Best Picture — is that fine?

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  Nina20h ago

  I'm a retired projectionist, spent 35 years in theaters, and I will take a room of people who bought tickets and sat in the dark together over any awards committee every single time. Committees give awards to what they want to be seen rewarding. Audiences just tell you what moved them.

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  Feli1d ago

  The Toronto People's Choice has predicted a Best Picture nominee something like eleven out of the last twelve years. At what point do we stop calling it an "early indicator" and just admit it's basically a qualifying round? The Oscar race used to at least pretend to last until January.

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  Ravi10h ago

  If you disagree that TIFF carries too much weight, explain how you square that with the fact that studios now deliberately time their releases and prints to hit the Toronto window specifically to trigger this effect. That's not a natural audience response anymore. That's a manufactured starting gun.

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  Yuki23h ago

  The complaint — since you asked — is that TIFF attendees are not a random sample of America. They're film-literate, largely progressive, disproportionately industry-adjacent, and they showed up specifically for a prestige film festival. Calling that "the audience" is like calling a wine competition "what people drink."

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  Feli16h ago

  I changed my mind on this actually. Used to think the TIFF hype machine was overblown. Then Green Book won the People's Choice AND Best Picture and I thought okay maybe there's something real here. Then Green Book won Best Picture and I remembered that both groups can be wrong in the exact same direction simultaneously.

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  Avery14h ago

  Serious question nobody's answering: how many of the Toronto voters who picked this film will actually see it again when it gets a wide release? Because if the answer is "almost none," then we're letting a festival screening experience — specific venue, specific crowd energy, post-Q&A glow — drive an awards conversation for a film that most Americans will watch alone on a Tuesday on a streaming app. Those are not the same viewing experience.

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  Noah 927h ago

  I'll be honest: I've been skeptical of the prestige film circuit for years, felt like the same movies with the same themes winning the same awards every cycle. But reading about what La Bola Negra is doing structurally — three timelines, three very different tonal registers, apparently almost no dialogue in the final act — that sounds like filmmakers actually swinging for something. Skeptical or not, I want to see that.

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  Omar L.11h ago

  My daughter studies film at NYU and she texted me about this yesterday, genuinely thrilled. I don't know anything about the Oscar race mechanics, but I know she lit up talking about a movie with gay characters across three generations being celebrated publicly. Whatever the academy politics are, that part seems worth something.

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  Feli R.18h ago

  The real issue nobody's saying out loud: this film is a Spanish-language LGBT epic and certain Academy branches are going to have a very complicated relationship with that combination, Toronto crowd or not. The People's Choice bump only goes so far when you hit the actual voting body.

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  Yuki5h ago

  Look, I'm gay, I'm 34, and I've sat through enough "important" LGBT movies that were really made for straight audiences to feel good about themselves. I'm withholding judgment until I actually see this one. A crowd award doesn't tell me whose gaze the film is actually shot for.

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  Omar23h ago

  I mean… paying audiences getting to decide feels more democratic than five industry insiders on a jury. What exactly is the complaint here?

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  Riley2h ago

  The question isn't whether Toronto should "carry this much weight." The question is why the Academy's own process carries so little weight that a September ballot from another country fills the vacuum. Fix the Oscars and this stops being a conversation.

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  Leo13h ago

  I work in film distribution and the TIFF bump is very real in terms of acquisitions and marketing spend. Studios absolutely plan around it. Calling it organic audience enthusiasm at this point is a little naive — the screenings are curated, the buzz is managed, and the Q&As are strategic. It's enthusiasm, yes, but it's engineered enthusiasm.

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  Liam8h ago

  "It's almost cute" is going to be the phrase I use every time someone acts like this award is some rigorous scientific process

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  Kofi M.16h ago

  the Green Book comparison is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this thread lol

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  Taylor B.3h ago

  Every year the takes get hotter earlier. Soon we'll be predicting Best Picture at Sundance in January for a film that hasn't been shot yet.

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  Ravi21h ago

  okay "three hours felt like forty minutes" is either a genuine recommendation or a cry for help and im not sure which

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  Nina13h ago

  "Engineered enthusiasm" is just called marketing and it applies to every film that has ever been released. You're not revealing a scandal, you're describing the industry.

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  Marco _x18h ago

  If "a few thousand people in Canada" bothers you, maybe examine why you're fine with a few thousand people in Los Angeles making the same call. At least Toronto voters aren't trying to protect their own industry's politics.

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  Reese4h ago

  This is the take I needed. Thank you.

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  Zara M.10h ago

  Studios time releases to every major festival. That's been true since Sundance in the 90s. The timing argument proves the festival matters, not that it's corrupted.

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  Nina3h ago

  the discourse has been predicting Best Picture winners since before the director signed the contract, im not even joking, i saw a "potential awards contender" piece about La Bola Negra in 2023

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  Noah19h ago

  Respectfully, that's a lovely sentiment and also completely wrong as a matter of history. Audiences also made Transformers a billion-dollar franchise. "People liked it" is not a synonym for "it is good."

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  Ravi14h ago

  That's the most genuinely interesting point in this thread and everyone's going to ignore it to keep arguing about whether Toronto is too liberal

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  Feli4h ago

  The Oscar race is an entertainment news product at this point. The actual Oscars are in March. It is September. Can we breathe.

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  Yuki8h ago

  I went to TIFF in 2019 and the People's Choice voting was literally a paper ballot handed to you as you left the theater. The whole system is charmingly low-tech and I say that as someone who works in data analytics. There's no algorithm. Someone counts the sheets. It's almost cute.

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  Morgan21h ago

  Every single year we do this. Movie wins Toronto. Twitter says Oscar race is over. Then something premieres at Telluride or Sundance in January and scrambles everything. Remember how certain everyone was about The Whale?

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  Yuki8h ago

  A Spanish film winning an English-language festival's top audience prize is actually a bigger deal than the Oscar implications and nobody's leading with that

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  Hana22h ago

  saw La Bola Negra last night and honestly it wrecked me. three hours felt like forty minutes. the grandfather storyline alone is worth whatever awards it gets

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  Feli R.12h ago

  he said he works in distribution cut him some slack he's probably just tired

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  Omar17h ago

  Both groups are self-selecting film enthusiasts. The Toronto crowd isn't more neutral just because they're farther from Hollywood geographically.

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  Avery 926h ago

  the no dialogue final act thing is either going to be extraordinary or unwatchable and I genuinely cannot predict which

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  Riley _x21h ago

  three hours?? hard pass

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  Theo11h ago

  this comment is going to live rent free in my head, very sweet

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  Kofi15h ago

  Can someone explain how the voting actually works at TIFF? Like is it every ticket holder for every film, or just people who saw the specific films in contention? Because that changes the math a lot and I never see anyone actually address it

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  Hana2h ago

  I just want to know if it has subtitles or a dub option for wide release because my husband refuses to read during movies and I'm already fighting this battle in my head

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  Marco B.18h ago

  ^ this guy has never had fun at a movie

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  Avery5h ago

  both simultaneously if the Venice reviews are any indication

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  Sam14h ago

  same goes for basically every prestige film though so i dont see why this one is different

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  Diego9h ago

  Nope. Not even close to the same thing. Sundance is discovery. TIFF prestige slate is a campaign launch. Different animal entirely.

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