Toronto’s Oscar Predictor Has Missed Five of the Last Six Years

TIFF closes on 20 September and hands out its People's Choice Award, and within an hour the same sentence will appear in a hundred places: the audience prize that picks the Best Picture winner.

It picks the Best Picture winner about one year in five. And it has now missed five of the last six.

The actual hit rate

Across 1998 to 2025 — twenty-eight ceremonies — the People's Choice winner went on to take Best Picture six times:

• American Beauty, 1999
• Slumdog Millionaire, 2008
• The King's Speech, 2010
• 12 Years a Slave, 2013
• Green Book, 2018
• Nomadland, 2020

Six from twenty-eight. That is 21 percent, in a race where roughly eight to ten films are nominated — which makes the award a better-than-random signal, and nothing remotely like a prophecy.

You will also see the figure seven. That version is also correct, and it counts Chariots of Fire from 1981, outside the window most pieces are actually describing. If a piece says seven and then lists years starting at 1998, it has inherited a number from a different denominator.

The streak broke last cycle, and quietly

The 2025 People's Choice Award went to Hamnet. At the Academy Awards in March, Best Picture went to One Battle After Another.

That was not an isolated miss. Run the recent record:

• 2021 — Belfast. Lost Best Picture
• 2022 — The Fabelmans. Lost
• 2023 — American Fiction. Lost
• 2024 — The Life of Chuck. Lost
• 2025 — Hamnet. Lost

The last time the award called it correctly was Nomadland, five years ago, in a pandemic-shortened season with a compressed field and almost no theatrical competition. Which is to say the predictor's most recent success came from the least representative awards year in living memory.

Two winners that are misremembered, and you will see both this week

The lists being copied around contain the same two errors with striking consistency:

• 2012 was Silver Linings Playbook, not Argo. Argo was a runner-up that year, and then won Best Picture — which is exactly the coincidence that makes the error spread. Attributing the People's Choice to Argo converts a miss into a hit and inflates the award's record by one
• 2019 was Jojo Rabbit, not Parasite. Parasite never won the People's Choice Award in any year. It is attached to 2019 because that is the year it won everything else

Both errors push in the same direction: they make the prize look more predictive than it is. Nobody misremembers a hit as a miss.

Why the reputation persists anyway

Partly because six correct calls is enough to build a narrative if you space them out over twenty-eight years and only mention the hits. Partly because the mechanism sounds right — a room full of ordinary ticket-buyers voting sincerely feels like it should correlate with an industry body voting strategically, and occasionally it does.

But the two electorates are not measuring the same thing. Toronto's audience votes on which film it most enjoyed sitting through in September. The Academy votes six months later, after a campaign, on a ballot where the reasons a film wins often have very little to do with how much anyone enjoyed it.

What the People's Choice Award does reliably predict is a nomination and a distribution bump. It puts a film into the conversation and gives its campaign a first credential. That is a real and valuable function, and it is not the one the award gets credit for.

One thing to hold until Sunday

The winner is announced at the festival's close on 20 September. As of today there is no result, and any piece this week naming a frontrunner is reporting festival buzz, not a vote.

Which is its own small irony. The award's whole claim to authority is that it counts actual ballots from actual audiences rather than trusting the room's impression — and the week before it is announced, the coverage runs entirely on the room's impression.