‘Hamnet’ Wins Oscar Predictive 2025 Toronto Film Festival People’s Choice Award

The People’s Choice Award from the just-wrapped 2025 50th Toronto Film Festival has gone to Hamnet, first runner-up is Frankenstein and second runner-up is Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.

Voted on by audience members since 1978 and often considered a harbinger for the Best Picture Oscar, the People’s Choice Award has been won by such eventual Best Picture Academy Award winners as Nomadland, Green Book, 12 Years a Slave, The King’s Speech, Slumdog Millionaire, American Beauty and Chariots of Fire. Among those that went on to Best Picture nominations include last year’s winner American Fiction, as well as The Fabelmans, Belfast, JoJo Rabbit, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri, Room, La La Land, The Imitation Game, Silver Linings Playbook, Precious, Life Is Beautiful, Places in the Heart and The Big Chill. Last year’s surprise winner, The Life Of Chuck had no North American distributor in place and was later picked up by Neon and released this summer making it Oscar eligible this year, just as the new People’s Choice winner is as well. So we shall see how the tradition of TIFF and Oscar hold up in this regard. Last year both the first runner up Emilia Perez and second runner up Anora went on to a collective 19 Oscar nominations between them, both nominated for Best Picture, with Anora winning.

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Hamnet is a 2024 historical drama film co-written, co-edited and directed by Chloé Zhao, based on Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel. Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal star in the emotionally charged drama that premiered at Telluride Film Festival and had its international premiere at TIFF. It is considered a major Oscar contender from Focus Features and represents Zhao’s second People’s Choice Award at TIFF after 2020’s Nomadland which went on to win the Best Picture Oscar.

Here is a list of all the TIFF award winners:

People’s Choice Award presented by Rogers: Hamnet, dir. Chloé Zhao

First runner-up: Frankenstein, dir. Guillermo del Toro

Second runner-up: Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, dir. Rian Johnson

International People’s Choice Award presented by Rogers: No Other Choice, dir. Park Chan-wook

First runner-up: Sentimental Value, dir. Joachim Trier

Second runner-up: Homebound, dir. Neeraj Ghaywan

People’s Choice Documentary Award presented by Rogers: The Road Between Us: The Ultimate Rescue, dir. Barry Avrich

First runner-up: EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert, dir. Baz Luhrmann

Second runner-up: You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution…, dir. Nick Davis

People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award presented by Rogers: Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie, dir. Matt Johnson

First runner-up: Obsession, dir. Curry Barker

Second runner-up: The Furious, dir. Kenji Tanigaki

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