Author: Scott Feinberg / Source: The Hollywood Reporter
Many felt it was a fait accompli that Bradley Cooper‘s A Star Is Born would win the Toronto International Film Festival’s Grolsch People’s Choice Award — a prize, voted by the fest’s audiences, that has a long history as a harbinger of Oscar success — because, apart from being an excellent film that played like gangbusters at the event, diehard fans of the film’s leading lady, Lady Gaga, many of whom haven’t yet seen the pic, were apparently trying to game the system by voting repeatedly for it online.
But instead, the prize went to Peter Farrelly‘s Green Book, a Universal dramedy inspired by the real Civil Rights-era friendship of African-American piano virtuoso Don Shirley and his Italian-American driver Tony Lip, played by Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensson, which was directed by Farrelly — yes, the same filmmaker who co-directed Dumb and Dumber and There’s Something About Mary. Universal had under-hyped that film going into the fest, opting to keep its First Man more front and center, but Green Book‘s world-premiere screenings could not have gone over better with Toronto audiences.
Shockingly, A Star Is Born, Warner Bros. chief awards hopeful, didn’t even finish in the top three. TIFF, seemingly aware of concerns about potential voting fraud,
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