The Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) has wrapped for another year, and despite the Academy Awards being nearly six months away, Oscar chatter has picked up with the announcement of TIFF’s 2013 Festival Award Winners. Despite its small number of awards being decided by the public rather than juries, the festival has a strong pedigree in predicting how Oscar members vote, a fact that has placed Steve McQueen’s bleak 12 Years a Slave at the top of tipsters’ lists with the announcement that it had won the main prize at TIFF, the People’s Choice award.
Here are Best Picture tips in graph form, courtesy of Gold Derby:
In further crystal-ball-gazing, McQueen now stands a chance to become the first black director to win the Best Director or Best Picture Oscar. His drama, based on a memoir of a free man kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841, stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as the slave first owned by Benedict Cumberbatch and then bought by sadistic plantation owner Michael Fassbender (in his third collaboration with McQueen).
Runner-up in Toronto was Philomena, scripted by Steve Coogan who joins a couple of awards vets in the form of co-star Judi Dench and director Stephen Frears. Second runner-up went to the Hugh Jackman/Jake Gyllenhaal thriller Prisoners, while the Tahir Square protest chronicle The Square won the documentary category ahead of Canadian indigenous education expose Hi-Ho Mistahey! and New Zealand’s Beyond the Edge, the recounting of Mt Everest’s conquest taking out an impressive third placing. The Midnight Madness section of the programme was won by Sion Sono’s awesomely-titled Why Don’t You Play in Hell, ahead of Mike Flanagan’s Oculus and Alex de la Iglesia’s Witching & Bitching.
12 Years a Slave is currently scheduled to open on February 6.
