La Bola Negra Wins TIFF’s People’s Choice Award — the Biggest Oscar Signal of the Fall

Toronto just handed out the most reliable Oscar tell of the fall, and it went to Netflix.

La Bola Negra, the time-bending queer epic from Spanish directors Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, won the TIFF People’s Choice Award presented by Rogers at the close of the 51st Toronto International Film Festival on Sunday. Peter Farrelly’s I Play Rocky finished first runner-up, and Siân Heder’s Being Heumann — which opened the festival — took second.

If you only track one festival result all year, this is the one. The People’s Choice is not a critics’ prize and not an industry vote — it’s the paying audience — and it has an absurd hit rate. By Variety’s count, 14 of the last 16 winners went on to a Best Picture nomination, and four of them — Nomadland, Green Book, 12 Years a Slave and The King’s Speech — won the whole thing. Last year’s winner, Hamnet, converted the trophy into eight nominations and a Best Actress win for Jessie Buckley.

What this actually does to the Oscar race

It gives Netflix its most credible Best Picture play in years, and it does it with a film that already had a Cannes Best Director prize on the shelf. Calvo and Ambrossi shared that award in May. Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close are in the cast. The streamer has spent the better part of a decade failing to win this category; it has rarely arrived with a stronger hand.

It’s also a small, useful embarrassment for the prediction industry. Three days before the festival closed, Variety’s awards desk ranked its ten most likely People’s Choice winners and put Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut at number one, with La Bola Negra second. The Debut didn’t place at all. Critic enthusiasm and crowd enthusiasm are different currencies, and the Academy spends both — which is exactly why the audience award is worth more than another five-star review.

Farrelly’s second-place finish deserves its own asterisk, because he has made this exact walk before: Green Book won the People’s Choice in 2018 and then won Best Picture. I Play Rocky, the story of Sylvester Stallone refusing to sell his script unless he got to star in it, has the crowd behind it and the softest reviews of anything in the top tier. Whether that combination still works is one of the more interesting questions of the next four months.

The Platform Prize just became an Oscar pipeline

The quieter headline out of Toronto is a rule change. For the first time, winning TIFF’s Platform Prize grants a non-English-language film direct eligibility for Best International Feature Film at the Academy Awards, putting TIFF alongside five other qualifying festivals. That is a meaningful piece of power for a festival that has always been better known for audience buzz than for juried prizes.

The first film through that door is Angh, from Indian director Theja Rio, chosen by a jury led by Pablo Trapero. The jury praised its “refreshing perspective, strength of filmmaking, and deeply resonant portrait of a world.” Amanda Kernell’s Brace Your Heart took a Special Jury Award.

The other People’s Choice winners

The International award went to Simon Stone’s Elsinore, with Lee Chang-dong’s Possible Love — South Korea’s official Oscar submission — as first runner-up and Hur Jin-ho’s The Assassin(s) second. Documentary went to Barry Avrich’s Darlene Love: I Know Where I’ve Been, ahead of Black Sunflowers and The Ultra Runner. Midnight Madness went to Matthew Rankin’s Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney, ahead of Paolo Strippoli’s The Spiral and SABU’s Arrested Memory.

The rest of the winners

• FIPRESCI Prize: Ancestors, dir. David Turpin
• NETPAC Award: Thirteen in Gaza, dir. Hosam Abu Dan
• Best Canadian Feature Film: Sunburn, dir. Serville Poblete
• Best Canadian Discovery: Smudge the Blades, dir. Cody Lightning
• Short Cuts, Best International Short: MAMMALIA, dir. Elia Kalogianni
• Short Cuts, Best Canadian Short: Fight Kid, dir. Michael Del Monte
• Short Cuts, Best Animated Short: Into The Betaverse, dirs. Varun Raman and Tom Hancock

TIFF ran 294 films from 72 countries across 11 days this year, with 12 awards handed out in total. The 52nd edition runs September 9–19, 2027.

We’re tracking the 99th Academy Awards — nominations January 21, 2027, ceremony March 14 — over at Oscar Watch, where we sort what’s confirmed from what’s just a prediction.