Toronto's People's Choice Goes to 'La Bola Negra'
The 51st Toronto Film Festival wrapped with its People's Choice Award going to Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi's 'La Bola Negra'. The runners-up were 'I Play Rocky' and 'Being Heumann', and the International People's Choice Award went to Simon Stone's 'Elsinore'.
The prize has a reputation as an awards-season bellwether, and IndieWire frames the win accordingly: the Spanish film had already been a hit out of its Cannes premiere, and TIFF now puts it "firmly launched into the heart of this year's awards season." Two festival watchers using the same word — 'predictive' — is a claim about a pattern, not a promise about the Oscars.
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Calling an award 'predictive' is itself the story. A festival audience prize rewards a room full of paying viewers, not Academy voters, and the two groups famously overlap only sometimes.
Overlap aside, TIFF's People's Choice track record is why the label sticks. Whether that holds for a Spanish-language epic after a Cannes run is the interesting open question.
The runner-up slots deserve attention too — 'I Play Rocky' and 'Being Heumann' finishing behind the winner says something about how the festival's crowds ranked an unusually varied slate.