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Jacob Tremblay plays the little kid called Jack.
THE low-budget thriller Room’ got a major leg up in Oscar’s Best Picture race after winning a key award at the Toronto International Film Festival.
Generating deafening buzz at both the back-to-back Telluride and Toronto festivals, Room nudged aside the presumed Oscar frontrunner, Spotlight, which had to settle for a second-place mention for Toronto’s eagerly sought audience award, considered an early bellwether for the Oscar race.
Five previous winners of the award have gone on to win the Best Picture Oscar: 12 Years a Slave (2013), The King’s Speech (2010), Slumdog Millionaire (2008), American Beauty (1999) and Chariots of Fire (1981).
The Toronto festival does not give out acting awards, but Room star Brie Larson did snag her first honours up north from the internet Movie Database, which gave her their “STARmeter award,’’ based on searches by the website’s 250 million monthly users.
Rising star Larson has received pretty much universal acclaim for her astonishing work in Room.
Brie Larson has also appeared in Trainwreck and 21 Jump Street.Source:Supplied
She brilliantly plays a woman who spends seven years in captivity after being abducted, raising a five-year-old son fathered by the man who imprisoned her in a tiny garden shed and rapes her on a regular basis. The second half of the film is about the difficult adjustment of her son and her after their escape.
Larson, who turns 26 next week, received a number of nominations and a few wins for her breakthrough role as a counsellor at a youth facility in Short Term 12 two years ago. She now looms as a formidable Best Actress competitor for Cate Blanchett, who turns in top-drawer performances in the lesbian romance Carol (which skipped Toronto and will show at the New York Film Festival) and the broadcasting docudramaTruth, but who won her second Oscar just last year for Blue Jasmine.
Still, in the curious dynamics of the Oscar race, the win by Room might actually be good news for Spotlight in the long run. That’s because early frontrunners — like last year’s Boyhood — often end up stumbling because of the intense scrutiny they’re subjected to.
TIFF’s artistic director, Cameron Bailey, referred to Room as the film “everyone will be speaking about through the autumn.’’ That definitely includes Oscar voters.
This article originally appeared in the New York Post.