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  • September 18, 2011

    Yes indeed, over at the Toronto Film Festival the audience award has been announced, something I always look forward to learning about each year.  The expectation was that the winner would be one of the many Oscar hopefuls playing to acclaim and that this boost would fuel it going into the soon approaching precursor season (previous winners include Slumdog Millionaire and most recently The King’s Speech).  Well, things didn’t exactly turn out that way at all, as you can see here from The Hollywood Reporter:

    -Attendees of the Toronto International Film Festival have voted to award the 2011 Cadillac People’s Choice Award, the festival’s highest honor, to Nadine Labaki‘s Where Do We Go Now?, a Lebanese drama, that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival back in May, and is still seeking domestic distribution.

    Where Do We Go Now? prevailed over a number of other popular options including Jonathan Levine‘s 50/50Michel Hazanavicius‘s The ArtistJim Field Smith‘s ButterAlexander Payne‘s The DescendantsNicolas Winding Refn‘s DriveJennifer Westfeldt‘s Friends with KidsLuc Besson‘s The LadyBennett Miller‘s MoneyballDee Rees‘s PariahOren Moverman‘s RampartSteve McQueen‘s Shame, and Jeff Nichols‘sTake Shelter.

    I’m not going to lie, I’m very surprised by this.  Granted, I wasn’t expecting something like Shame to take the prize, but I had thought that The Artist was easily the favorite, with something like 50/50 or The Descendants also being well in play, with even Take Shelter waiting in the wings.  So much for that…

    -Thoughts?

    About Joey Magidson


    When he’s not obsessing over new Oscar predictions on a weekly basis, Joey is seeing between 200 and 300 movies a year. He views the best in order to properly analyze the awards race/season each year, but he also watches the worst for reasons he mostly sums up as "so you all don't have to". In his spare time, you can usually find him complaining about the Jets or the Mets. Still, he lives and dies by film. Joey's a voting member of the Internet Film Critics Association as well. Today the IFCA, tomorrow the world!

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    6 Comments

    1. Having seen almost none of the films that played at Toronto – including Where Do We Go Now? – I’m very pleased with this choice *on principle.* There’s something inspiring and egalitarian about a little-known Lebanese drama beating out several “Oscar contenders” for a major festival award, especially since film festivals are too often seen nowadays as nothing more than a barometer of Academy appeal instead of as a chance for precisely the kind of movie that Nadine Labaki premiered to find an audience. Unlike financial markets, uncertainty is a good thing in the awards season, and films like The Descendants and The Artist can survive spreading the wealth around to smaller fare without a distributor.

      Plus, I’d argue that this does bring into focus one aspect of the Oscars: Best Foreign Language Film. It is Lebanon’s official submission this year, and People’s Choice Winners have produced several champs in that category including Tsotsi and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

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    2. Indeed. Makes the race better, but our jobs harder.

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    3. Wow…just wow. I could do the research but this has not been picked up yet, right? Although I’m sure Sony Pictures Classics is dispatching their team as we speak if this film is still a “free agent.” Still…kudos on the choice and its nice to have a shake up and surprise this early on!

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    4. What do you think of Butter’s Oscars chances now?

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