Green Book, the Peter Farrelly-directed film about a Jamaican-American pianist touring the Deep South in the 1960s, has massively boosted its Oscars chances after taking the top prize at the Toronto film festival.
The festival’s People’s Choice award has long been seen as a reliable Oscars bellwether, with nine out of the last 10 winners going on to secure a best picture Academy Award or nomination, including La La Land, 12 Years a Slave and Slumdog Millionaire.
Green Book stars Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali, and is based on accounts of a real-life tour by pianist Don Shirley and driver-bodyguard Tony Lip. (One of the film’s writers, Nick Vallelonga, is Lip’s son.) The title refers to a pre-civil-rights-era publication called The Negro Motorist Green Book, which acted as a guidebook for African-Americans travelling by car around a potentially hostile US when public transport was largely segregated.
The film also represents something of a comeback for Farrelly (here directing without his brother Bobby), who achieved success in the 1990s with a series of gross-out comedies including Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin and There’s Something About Mary, but has largely failed to hit the heights since.
Toronto’s People’s Choice award for documentary went to Free Solo, a film about death-defying mountain climber Alex Honnold, directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin. The award for the festival’s Midnight Madness slot went to the Indian action film The Man Who Feels No Pain, featuring Abhimanyu Dassani.
