The Toronto Film Festival People’s Choice Awards will be revealed tomorrow. I’m hoping that Green Book wins the popularity prize, but the betting is that A Star Is Born has it in the bag; ditto Lady Gaga for Best Actress. The suspicion is that high-fervor Lady Gaga fans will be avalanching the process.
It’s been claimed that the voting system isn’t fair — that you don’t have to see the film to vote & can vote multiple times for the same film with different email addresses. But TIFF spokesperson Andrea Grau says this isn’t true — that TIFF has “ensured that an individual cannot vote for the same film multiple times by email address. The data is processed through our system which then analyses the origin of the vote and matches votes to TIFF’s ticket buyer information and database.
“Using these methods any attempts to sway the result through mass campaign voting can be quickly identified and discounted.”
It’s also been suggested that TIFF should reinstate the rule that voting for a film is limited to those who actually watched a film (e.g., entering some sort of proof or barcode or whatever). I’m not even sure when or if that rule was removed. I’ve asked around; hard to pin down.