‘La Bola Negra’ Wins Oscar-Predictive Toronto Film Festival People’s Choice Award

The People’s Choice Award from the just-wrapped 51st Toronto Film Festival has gone to Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s La Bola Negra , first runner-up is I Play Rocky and second runner-up is Being Heumann.

Also in the awards revealed Sunday morning, the International People’s Choice Award went to Simon Stone’s Elsinore . The Documentary People’s Choice winner was Barry Avrich’s Darlene Love: I Know Where I’ve Been. The Midnight Madness People’s Choice winner was Ladies And Gentlemen: Brian Mulroney, (incidentally box office phenomenon Obsession was first runner up last year).

La Bola Negra tells the story of three generations of men whose lives are intimately connected through desire, pain, and love. It is Spain’s official entry into the International Film Oscar race and is expected to figure strongly in many other categories at the Academy Awards. Netflix releases it in theatres on October 16. Interestingly the two runners-up come from filmmakers whose previous film has won the Best Picture Oscar: I Play Rocky‘s Peter Farrelly’s Green Book (which also won the Tiff People’s Choice in 2018) and Sian Heder’s Coda.

Voted on by audience members since 1978 and often considered a harbinger for the Best Picture Oscar, the People’s Choice Award has been won by such eventual Best Picture Academy Award winners as Nomadland, Green Book, 12 Years a Slave, The King’s Speech, Slumdog Millionaire, American Beauty and Chariots of Fire. Among those that went on to Best Picture nominations include last year’s winner Hamnet, American Fiction, The Fabelmans, Belfast, JoJo Rabbit, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, Room, La La Land, The Imitation Game, Silver Linings Playbook, Precious, Life Is Beautiful, Places in the Heart and The Big Chill. So we shall see how the tradition of TIFF and Oscar hold up in this regard.

For the first year the winner of the Platform Award that TIFF gives is instantly eligible for the Oscar International Film Award, no need for the film to be submitted by its home country, and one of only six film festivals that offer this opportunity. The Platform Prize went to India’s Angh from filmmaker Theja Rio, now automatically entered into this year’s International Film Oscar competition. India has yet to announce its own official entry.