Oscar watchers on high alert as Spielberg’s The Fabelmans wins TIFF People’s Choice Award
The Toronto International Film Festival audience award has been a prime predictor of Best Picture winners since the 1980s
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Old Stevie might need to clear some room on the mantle. Per Deadline, the three-time Oscar winner’s autobiographical film, The Fabelmans, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last week, won the coveted People’s Choice Award on Sunday.
While winning awards is all well and good, this one holds special significance. Oscars watchers believe TIFF’s audience award to be a bellwether for the Best Picture prize at the Academy Awards. Since 1978, the audience award has gone to Best Picture winners such as Green Book, 12 Years A Slave, Slumdog Millionaire, American Beauty, Nomadland, and Chariots Of Fire. Most winners at TIFF tend to be nominated. Movies like The Big Chill, Shine, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Silver Linings Playbook, Precious, and The Intimidation Game were also nominated for Best Picture.
Runners up for the award also do well. Argo, Parasite, and Spotlight all came up short at TIFF only to win on Oscar night. This is all good news for Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and Sarah Polley’s Women Talking, both runners-up this year.
But failing to pick up the Best Picture win isn’t the only option. Jojo Rabbit won the audience award and earned Taika Waititi a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar, and Michael Moore’s Bowling For Columbine took home Best Documentary Feature.
What does this tell us? Well, nothing, but it’s fun to think about. It also gives a sense of the types of movies that Oscar voters tend to favor. However, watching the Academy Awards will also tell you that the Academy prefers movies like Green Book over If Beale Street Could Talk. If they didn’t, Beale Street would have won.
As for the TIFF People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award, well, that one’s “Weird.” Eric Appel’s Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, a biopic spoof starring Daniel Radcliffe, won the Midnight Madness Award, with Ti West’s Pearl and Tim Story’s The Blackening the two runners-up.
Maybe this year will be the start of a new tradition and Weird will win Best Picture. We can only hope that the Academy does the right thing and dares to be stupid.
26 Comments
That new Spielberg film looks like a prescription for insomnia. Blah. And Dare To Be Stupid is Al’s best album. Just saying.
The reviews of the Fabelmans have been good, but the trailer seems strangely inert to me. Slate’s review kind of said the same thing—for a semi-autobiographical movie it seemed strangely distanced to them. I’ll probably see it when my friend gets his “For your consideration” screeners, but I’m not going to rush out to see it. It doesn’t feel like it has that kind of buzz to me, but maybe I’m wrong. (Also, and of less importance, it’s The Imitation Game that got an Oscar nomination, not The Intimidation Game.)
Oscar voters being largely professional imitators rather than intimidators, that checks out.
That’s how I felt about Belfast last year. It felt a bit too neat and sanitized for something a movie set in the middle of the troubles. The family are the only truly developed characters, and the parents even disagree mostly rationally and civilly. Having so few moments of real ugliness made it feel less personal than it probably should have been, and maybe even a bit dishonest.
The Intimidation Game would be a great title for how Weinstein browbeat voters into picking his films for best picture. Among other things.
Saw Women Talking and Banshees of Inisherin. Both amazing and Oscar contenders for sure.
I really liked the novel Women Talking and was surprised to see it had been made into a feature. It didn’t strike me as particularly suited for adaptation, so I’m very much looking forward to seeing how Sarah Polley pulled it off.
Movie people really love movie about people making/working in movie industries isn’t it?
Like most humans, movie people are mostly interested in themselves and people like them. They just have a platform to be loud about it. If truckers were suddenly given a huge media platform, you can bet they’d pay a lot of attention to stories about truckers.
I don’t want to hear stories about someone like me. I strive to lead a boring life.
That explains your boring comment.;)
Maybe, but I doubt you’d find another profession SO enamored of itself, outside of Washington anyway. Hollywood’s predictable reaction to a prestige movie about movies:
When you’re older, you’ll realize that virtually *every* industry fosters their own self-celebration, and give out awards and status-indicators & trinkets for its own members’ ego-satisfaction – and that villifying the *all the other* industries’ pomposity just serves to help your own go down easier.
The list of past People’s Choice Award winners includes some good movies (also Green Book). But it is definitely heavy on movies that are broad, uncomplicated, and flatter the audience. Frankly, that’s what the trailer suggested The Fabelmans is.
Spielberg making a movie about his childhood is not exactly going to result in something transgressive.
A movie can be bold, complicated, and subtle without being transgressive. The Fabelmans doesn’t really look like it’s any of those things.
Of the movies that won both TIFF and the best picture Oscar, only Nomadland and MAYBE 12 Years a Slave really strike me as defensible choices for best movie of their respective years.
I think expecting the Best Picture winner to truly be the Best Picture is always going to let you down. But I think it isn’t too much to ask that the Best Picture winner is truly a great movie, and one thing that both the TIFF and Oscars audiences instead seem to love instead is middlebrow fare that flatters the audience.
Oh, yeah, I legitimately just meant “defensible.” After a certain level of quality, there is going to be some room for argument and personal taste. In an average year, there are maybe 3-10 movies released that sit comfortably in that tier. The fact that there are so many years where the double winner didn’t crack it is pretty telling, though.
and The Intimidation Game
You needlessly italicized “and”, and got the name of “The Imitation Game” wrong. Impressive in just a four-word string.
Spielberg Delivers Soapy Titwank To Hollywood; Oscar Statuette Secured
There’s still time for someone to make a movie about a person doing it with a fish or a white guy learning to be tolerant. Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.
Don’t count your chickens before they hatch.What about my human-chicken hybrids, from my film about a dude who falls in love with and fucks a sexy, sexy Australorp?
Yep, up there with La La Land as far as “the magic of hollywood” wankery goes
Why is this TIFF thing so important now? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it before. Maybe I read about it every year and just forget, but why do we care about it again?
I know it’s cool to hate on Spielberg but he is a legitimately masterful filmmaker and I look forward to anything he directs.