by Nathaniel R
Go figure. The winner of TIFF's "Grolsch's People's Choice Award" is a film that literally none of my TIFF airbnb troupe (Joe Reid, Chris Feil, Nick Davis and I) saw during our 10 day stretch in Ontario. Green Book by Peter Farrelly (yes, of Dumb and Dumber and There's Something About Mary fame) took TIFF's most coveted prize. (the runners up were Barry Jenkins' If Beale Street Could Talk and Alfonso Cuarón's Roma). So we'll have to add it to the Best Picture chart when we update this week (we're looking at probably Wednesday night for across the board updates to reflect all the festival madness).
In the entire 40 year history of this prize, stretching From Girlfriends (1978) through Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017), 16 of the winners went on to Best Picture nods at the Oscars. The 40 winners also include 7 future Best Picture winners, 6 future Best Foreign Language Film winners, and 2 future Best Documentary Feature winners. The Oscar correlation is getting stronger all the time, too...
In the past 10 years only 1 of the winners (the Lebanese musical Where Do We Go Now? a surprise snub at the Oscars in the foreign film category at the time) was not Best Picture nominated. So a 90% recent track record is pretty good news for this film. The People's Choice winners that failed to grab Best Picture nods have mostly been foreign films and Canadian films and many of those outliers went on to Oscar nominations in other categories, including Best Foreign Language Film. In short, this particular prize is a great Oscar bellwether. Green Book may well turn out to the be the surprise of the season since no one was talking about this movie a couple of weeks ago.
Green Book is about the friendship of an Italian-American chauffeur (Viggo Mortensen) and the African-American classical pianist (Mahersha Ali) he drives around for a tour in the American south in the 1960s. People are already (perhaps superficially) comparing it to Driving Miss Daisy, with the white/black roles reversed. Universal Pictures had a Best Picture nominee last season with the crowd-pleaser Get Out but hasn't won the top prize since A Beautiful Mind (2001). They'll release this road trip drama on November 21st in US cinemas, just in time for the Thanksgiving weekend box office. We hope Universal has the cajones to campaign both Viggo and Mahershala as Best Lead Actor since this is obviously a two hander and no one pretends two lead films don't have two leads unless they share a gender. If they do commit category fraud we're assuming they'll place Mahershala as lead, ignoring that Viggo has top billing, since it's a true story and Ali's character is the character with a claim to fame.
Complete List of Prize Winners
The Man Who Feels No Pain is an action comedy from India.
GROLSCH PEOPLE'S CHOICE AWARDS
People's Choice: Green Book (Peter Farrely). Runners up: If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins, US), and Roma (Alfonso Cuarón, Mexico)
People's Choice Midnight Madness: The Man Who Feels No Pain (Vasan Bala, India). Runners up: Halloween (David Gordon Green, US), and Assassination Nation (Sam Levinson, US)
People's Choice Documentary Feature: Free Solo (E Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin). Runners up: This Changes Everything (Tom Donahue) and The Biggest Little Farm (John Chester)
In truth I'm a bit surprised that Roma and If Beale Street... were the runners up since they're both very painterly slow burns and I thought something more mainstream-exciting like Widows or A Star is Born might factor in.
Brotherhood
This Magnificent Cake!
the boyfriend/girlfriend of "Fuck You"
SHORTS JURY
Best Canadian Short Brotherhood (Meryam Joobeur, Tunisia/Canada). Honorable Mention: Fauve (Jérémy Comte, Canada)
Best Short The Field (d. Sandhya Suri, India/France/UK). Honorable mentions: Fuck You (Anette Sudor, Sweden), This Magnificent Cake! (Emma de Swaef and Marc James Roels)
TIFF is an Oscar-qualifying festival so we might see some of those titles in the short film Oscar races. It would be hilarious to see Fuck You make an Oscar longlist because it's about a Swedish girl who steals a strap-on to challenge her boyfriend to expand his sexual boundaries (!!!). I'm also intrigued by This Magnificent Cake! which is a surreal Belgian animated short about European colonialism.
Roads in February is a Spanish language Canadian co-production
CANADIAN FEATURES JURY
Best Canadian First Feature Roads in February (Katherine Jerkovic, Canada/Uruguay)
Best Canadian Feature The Fireflies are Gone (Sébastien Pilote, Canada)
Jamie Bell stars in Skin
FIPRESCI JURY (International Federation of Film Critics)
Discovery Program: Float Like a Butterfly (Vamerl Winters, Ireland). Honorable Mention: Twin Flower (Laura Luchetti, Italy)
Special Presentations: Skin (Guy Nattiv, US). Honorable Mention: A Faithful Man (Louis Garrel, France)
A Faithful Man is playing at NYFF in a couple of week. Skin, stars Jamie Bell as a skinhead, raised in a white supremacist home (Vera Farmiga is said to be "unrecognizable" as his mother) trying to leave his hateful past behind by a painful procedure to remove his tattoos. Danielle MacDonald (from PattiCake$) plays his new girlfriend who has already left her fascist past behind. It was picked up by A24 (with their DirectTV partnership) for distribution in 2019.
The Third Wife. Will we see this become Vietnam's Oscar entry NEXT season?
NETPAC JURY (Network for the Promotion of Asian Pacific Cinema)
World Cinema AND Discovery Program: The Third Wife (Ash Mayfair, Vietnam). Honorable Mention: The Crossing (Bai Xue, China)
The Third Wife is a debut feature from female writer/director Ash Mayfair and takes place in the rural Vietnam of the 19th century.
"Fig Tree" is a beauty
EURIMAGES AUDENTIA AWARD
Best Female Director Aäläm-Wärque Davidian for Fig Tree (Israel/Ethiopia). Honorable Mention: Camilla Strøm Henriksen for Phoenix (Norway)
We already reviewed Fig Tree in brief here. It was an Ophir nominee for Best Picture in Israel this season. I'm not at all sure how the Norwegian film Phoenix escaped my radar entirely because I always try to see Scandinavian films at festivals. That said TIFF screens hundreds of films so it's easy to make an error in your planning.
Cities of Last Things
TORONTO PLATFORM PRIZE PRESENTED BY AIR FRANCE
Platform Prize Wi Ding Ho for Cities of Last Things (Taiwan / China). Honorable Mention: Emir Baigazin for The River (Kazakhstan)
This is a relatively new prize focused on emerging directors and the jury was heavyweights this year: Mira Nair, Béla Tarr, and Lee Chang-dong. I am now kicking myself because I had Cities of Last Things on my schedule but skipped it at the last minute due to festival fatigue and its topic: told in reverse chronological order it begins with a suicide and then charts how the man got there and I just wasn't up for that that night. I did however see The River which is gorgeous and unusual and really lingers. You should definitely see it if it ever crosses your path. I hope it will be Kazakshtan's Oscar submission either this year or next depending on its release schedule so that it can grab a slightly higher profile.