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Toronto: 'Green Book' Audience Award Confirms Its Status as Major Oscar Contender.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ra...-award-1143784

"Many had expected 'A Star Is Born' to run away with the prize, which is often a harbinger of Oscar success, but it ultimately did not finish in the top three.

Many felt it was a fait accompli that Bradley Cooper's A Star Is Born would win the Toronto International Film Festival's Grolsch People's Choice Award — a prize, voted by the fest's audiences, that has a long history as a harbinger of Oscar success — because, apart from being an excellent film that played like gangbusters at the event, diehard fans of the film's leading lady, Lady Gaga, many of whom haven't yet seen the pic, were apparently trying to game the system by voting repeatedly for it online.

But instead, the prize went to Peter Farrelly's Green Book, a Universal dramedy inspired by the real Civil Rights-era friendship of African-American piano virtuoso Don Shirley and his Italian-American driver Tony Lip, played by Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensson, which was directed by Farrelly — yes, the same filmmaker who co-directed Dumb and Dumber and There's Something About Mary. Universal had under-hyped that film going into the fest, opting to keep its First Manmore front and center, but Green Book's world-premiere screenings could not have gone over better with Toronto audiences.

Shockingly, A Star Is Born, Warner Bros. chief awards hopeful, didn't even finish in the top three.

TIFF, seemingly aware of concerns about potential voting fraud, tweeted on Saturday, "Once we receive an online vote we take many steps to ensure the submissions are legit — including checking the origin of the votes and if they are coming from ticket holders. Don't worry, we got this." On Sunday, TIFF's outgoing CEO Piers Handling, asked by The Hollywood Reporter about the absence of A Star Is Born, confirmed that specific measures were taken to ensure that "no one crashed the voting process."

In the end, the second runner-up was Alfonso Cuaron's black-and-white Spanish-language Netflix drama Roma; the first runner-up was Barry Jenkins' follow-up to his best picture Oscar winner Moonlight, the James Baldwin adaptation If Beale Street Could Talk, from Annapurna."

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