La Bola Negra wins TIFF, where 16 of 18 winners made best picture

Sixteen of the last eighteen winners of Toronto's People's Choice Award went on to a best picture nomination. Five of them won the thing outright. That is the record La bola negra inherited on Sunday afternoon, and it arrives with one very specific hole in it.

Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, the Spanish directing pair who work as Los Javis, took the audience prize at the close of the 51st Toronto International Film Festival. Peter Farrelly's I Play Rocky was first runner-up and Siân Heder's Being Heumann second, per the festival's own announcement on 20 September.

The hole is language. Across those eighteen years, Toronto's audience has picked a film not in English exactly once. Nadine Labaki's Where Do We Go Now? won in 2011. It received no Oscar nominations whatsoever, having gone in as Lebanon's submission for best foreign language film and failed to survive even to the shortlist.

What the eighteen-year record actually measures

Run the list from 2008 and the shape is plain. Slumdog Millionaire, The King's Speech, 12 Years a Slave, Green Book and Nomadland all won Toronto and then best picture. Eleven more were nominated and lost, a run that goes from Precious through La La Land and The Fabelmans to Chloé Zhao's Hamnet, which carried eight nominations into the 98th Academy Awards in March and left with one, Jessie Buckley's best actress.

Two missed altogether. Labaki's film, and Mike Flanagan's The Life of Chuck, which won Toronto in 2024 and was nowhere near the best picture line-up on 15 March.

So the award predicts nominations at 89 per cent and wins at 28 per cent. Those are two different claims, and every September they get treated as one.

The 2024 ballot nobody quotes back

2024 is the year worth holding against this one. Toronto's audience put The Life of Chuck first, Jacques Audiard's Emilia Pérez second and Sean Baker's Anora third. Eighteen months later the film ranked third had won best picture, the film ranked first had not been nominated, and the one in the middle had taken 13 nominations, the most any non-English-language film has ever managed, and converted two of them.

Emilia Pérez is the nearest template for what Netflix is about to attempt, and the comparison is not entirely flattering. That film was Spanish-language, streamer-backed, beloved at festivals, and then argued about for four solid months. It was also France's submission for best international feature rather than its own country's, a detail that fed the row.

La bola negra does not have that problem. Spain picked it on 16 September ahead of The Beloved and Sundays, Variety reported, from what several Spanish critics called the strongest submission field the country has assembled.

Netflix has done this twelve times

Netflix has been nominated for best picture twelve times since Roma in 2019 and has never won. The two most recent were Frankenstein, with nine nominations, and Train Dreams, both beaten in March by Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another. Apple cleared the same bar on its first serious run, with CODA in 2022. Netflix has spent seven years not clearing it.

That is the context for the thirteenth attempt, and it is a better one than the streamer has had in a while. La bola negra holds 91 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes from 47 reviews and 86 on Metacritic from 13, and it already won the best director prize at Cannes in May, shared between Calvo and Ambrossi and Paweł Pawlikowski for Fatherland. The Palme d'Or that year went to Cristian Mungiu's Fjord, according to the festival's winners list, and the Grand Prix to Andrey Zvyagintsev's Minotaure, which France has since entered for the same international feature Oscar.

Only one film in a language other than English has ever won best picture. That was Parasite, six years ago, and no Spanish-language film has come close.

The forty-seven-day window

The release plan is the most revealing number in the file, and nobody has put it next to the others. La bola negra opens in American cinemas on 16 October and reaches Netflix on 2 December. That is 47 days.

Frankenstein had 21, from 17 October to 7 November last year. Emilia Pérez had 12, from 1 November 2024 to 13 November. Netflix has given this film more than double the theatrical gap it gave the picture that went on to lead the entire nominations field.

Forty-seven days is not a theatrical release in the sense exhibitors mean, and the company is not buying box office with it. It is buying six weeks in which academy members can be told, truthfully, that a 159-minute Spanish-language film about queer life under the Second Republic and the Civil War is playing in cinemas. On a reported budget of 15 million euros, that is a cheap piece of positioning.

The rest of the Toronto vote

Simon Stone's Elsinore took the International People's Choice Award, with Lee Chang-dong's Possible Love first runner-up. That is the film that arrived from Venice with the best reviews of the festival and an ovation cut short because staff needed the room.

Barry Avrich's Darlene Love: I Know Where I've Been won the documentary award. Matthew Rankin's Ladies and Gentlemen, Brian Mulroney took Midnight Madness. The Platform Prize went to Angh, directed by Theja Rio of India.

None of those will decide anything in March, when the best picture race is likely to be measured against The Odyssey and the money it has made. Toronto's audience award will, at least partly. It has been wrong twice in eighteen years, and one of those times it was wrong about the only film it ever picked that had subtitles.

The international feature shortlist lands on 15 December, a fortnight after the film starts streaming. Nominations are read on 21 January 2027, and the 99th Academy Awards are on 14 March.