3 Strong Best Picture Contenders Emerge from Toronto (Maybe)
A version of this story first appeared on The Ankler .
With Emmys finally in the rearview and the hubbub of Toronto, Telluride and Venice now firming up the awards season ahead, I originally thought I could devote today's newsletter to the biggest questions of the biggest Oscar race: best picture. This time last year, even with the uncertainty of the strikes and the thrilling festival premieres of The Holdovers and Poor Things, all signs pointed to an awards season dominated by summer's twin blockbusters Barbie and Oppenheimer.
That's more or less what happened, and last year — like Everything Everywhere All at Once the year before it — Oppenheimer was the best picture frontrunner immune to the hype around films that opened later in the year and tried to steal its thunder.
That's almost certainly not going to happen this year. Of all the 2024 movies that have opened so far, only Dune: Part Two, Challengers and Sing Sing seem to have a realistic chance of breaking into the best picture race. There are plenty of strong bets on the horizon, from Palme d'Or winner Anora to the sequel to best picture winner Gladiator. But for the first time in the post-Covid era, we're halfway through September without anything you could reasonably call a best picture frontrunner.
I thought I could lay out the stakes of all that in this newsletter — and then I got 300 words into writing about TIFF's People's Choice Award winner, The Life of Chuck — which doesn't even have a distributor — and realized that we may need more than one day to explain everything going on out there.
So today I'm dialing in on The Life of Chuck and the two films that were runner-ups for the People's Choice prize, Netflix's Emilia Pérez and Neon's Anora. There were so many other major contenders to talk about out of TIFF, from the titles I believed had a chance at that People's Choice prize — Conclave, The Wild Robot, Saturday Night, We Live in Time — to the strong crop of best actress contenders who played at the festival. I promise we'll get to them; awards season is long, and we've only just begun.
In the back half of today's dispatch I'll also share more from my podcast conversation with Karla Sofia Gascón, the star of Emilia Pérez, who is frank that she does the best work of her career in the film's titular role — even if she's not totally ready for all the red carpet appearances that come along with promoting it.
The People's Choice: The Life of Chuck
For more than a decade, the winner of the TIFF People's Choice Award has been a film brought to the festival by a major studio or streamer, with specific hopes of launching into a best picture campaign from there.
Then came this year's winner, Mike Flanagan's The Life of Chuck, which arrived at the festival without distribution and has yet to be picked up, though I'm told there's already a lot of interest. It's the first film without distribution to win the People's Choice Awards since Nadine Labaki's Where Do We Go Now? in 2011 — which, as it turns out, was also the last TIFF winner not to earn a best picture nomination.
Plenty of pundits expect The Life of Chuck, a sentimental crowd-pleaser adapted from a Stephen King novella, to follow the same path. It's a likable movie but not necessarily a groundbreaking one, with winning performances from Tom HiddlestonMark Hamill and a slightly convoluted sci-fi concept that resolves into a pretty straightforward lesson about life. You could build a campaign for both Hiddleston and Hamill, and potentially for Flanagan's adapted screenplay, but it would be unlikely to compete in most crafts categories or get a huge push from critics groups.
The entire point of the People's Choice Award, though, is to identify the fan favorites in the awards race, the more accessible films that might balance out the artier efforts. That was true of last year's winner American Fiction and 2022's The Fabelmans, and you could have predicted the outcome of the 2018 Oscars by noticing that Netflix's Roma was bested for People's Choice by eventual best picture winner Green Book.
To me, The Life of Chuck is somewhere between Green Book and American Fiction in quality, which means it is plenty good enough to get a best picture nomination if someone is willing to try. Given Flanagan's overall TV deal at Amazon, I'm a little surprised Prime Video hasn't already picked this one up, but there's still time. Get Hiddleston on the campaign trail to recreate his electrifying mid-movie dance number, and you've got at least a dozen votes right there.
Emilia Pérez
There was widespread speculation in Toronto that Emilia Pérez might be the People's Choice winner, based both on enthusiastic audience response and the film's sheer number of public screenings. As you can read in my conversation with Gascón below, everyone who sees the film is eager to talk to her and her co-stars about how this fever dream of a musical came to be.
Coming in second might not be quite as good as placing first, but Emilia Pérez still has the wind at its back, with Netflix going all in — the party following its TIFF premiere was lavish — and regional festival stops planned ahead of its Nov. 1 theatrical premiere. With the exception of last year, Netflix has had a contender place with People's Choice every year since it first started going hard into the Oscar race in 2018. Emilia Pérez is now in the same position as such previous top contenders as Roma and The Power of the Dog — and is aiming to go even further.
Just hours ago Netflix confirmed that Gascón — the title character and the breakout star — will run in lead, with her more famous co-stars Zoe Saldaña Selena Gomez as well as Adriana Paz in supporting. All will be formidable competition, as will director Jacques Audiard, many of the film's crafts and whichever earworm original song they decide to submit, too. Now that the film is officially France's selection in the international feature race, you can probably add that to Emilia's nominations tally.
Toronto's People's Choice Awards tend to heavily favor world premieres, or at least titles that have only screened for a handful of people a few days earlier in Telluride. Before Emilia Pérez and Anora came in second and third this year, the last film to have premiered at a large festival earlier in the calendar which then placed for People's Choice was Parasite. Need I remind you what happened for Parasite after that?
Emilia Pérez and Anora were two of the biggest titles to premiere at Cannes in May, and will be the biggest test since Parasite of how much Cannes and the Oscar race can overlap. Neon, which brought Anora to Cannes , is backing its fifth Palme d'Or winner in a row, and is betting that the wave of affection that met auteur Bong Joon-ho can be replicated for Anora's Sean Baker.
Like many of Baker's previous films, Anora is the story of someone with dreams bigger than her station in life — in this case the titular Anora (25-year-old Mikey Madison), a stripper and sex worker whose encounter with the shiftless son of a Russian billionaire (Mark Eydelshteyn) transforms her life. Madison is already looking strong in the lead actress race, and supporting players like Eydelshteyn and Yura Borisov are very much in the mix of a wide-open supporting actor race. The fact that the English-language Anora can get attention for its breakthrough actors and the South Korean Parasite couldn't is, of course, evidence that the Academy's more international bent may still have its limits.
We're probably not done wondering if the Oscars are ready for the transgender cartel leader at the center of Emilia Pérez or the foul-mouthed sex workers of Anora; as I wrote when I was freshly home from TIFF, it's an unusually bold group of contenders right now, and too soon to tell if more straightforward aspirants such as Gladiator 2 or the newly announced September 5 will push ahead of them.
But an award at TIFF, or even a runner-up nod, makes a strong case that once audiences actually meet Emilia and Anora, they'll fall in love, too.
The Woman Behind 'Emilia Pérez'
Karla Sofia Gascón has had the chance to talk to a lot of moviegoers since Emilia Pérez premiered at Cannes in May, and particularly over the past few weeks, when the film, about a Mexican drug cartel leader who transitions to living openly as a woman, has dazzled audiences in both Telluride and Toronto. But there's one question people keep asking her that she finds totally baffling: Who plays Emilia before her transition?
The answer is that it's Gascón herself, under prosthetics and with a terrifying gravelly voice that she demonstrated for me during our conversation for the podcast. "On one hand," she tells me via a translator, being told that she slips so seamlessly into the role is "the biggest prize I could have gotten with this movie. But on the other hand, my ego is like, hey, wait a second. Maybe there are people going out of the movie and not knowing that it was actually me who did it."
A Spanish actress who had a long career in Mexico prior to her transition, Gascón fought to play both versions of Emilia Pérez, even though director Jacques Audiard initially assumed she wouldn't want to do it. Though the French Audiard doesn't speak Spanish, and Gascón doesn't speak French, she says they connected via a kind of telepathic bond and a childlike enthusiasm for their work.
"We're both very creative, very passionate people," Gascón says. "We have a very deep love for our work. But I think mostly what happens with us is that we're both like children on the set. If you take two children from any nationality, playing on the street in the sand, they can perfectly play with each other without understanding each other's language."
