Three Billboards heads for Oscar glory after winning Toronto's People's Choice award

Martin McDonagh’s black comedy Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri has received a major boost in its Oscar prospects by winning the top honour at the Toronto international film festival.

The film, which stars Frances McDormand as a mother who takes matters into her own hands when the police fail to find out who murdered her teenage daughter, was awarded the People’s Choice award, ahead of I, Tonya, a biopic of disgraced figure skater Tonya Harding, and Luca Guadagnino’s gay love story Call Me By Your Name. The victory is the second for the film since its premiere earlier this month at the Venice film festival, where it received the best screenplay prize.

Three Billboards is McDonagh’s first film since 2012’s Seven Psychopaths, a violent meta crime caper that starred Colin Farrell, Sam Rockwell and Woody Harrelson. Before that McDonagh directed the acclaimed black comedy In Bruges, which starred Farrell and Brendan Gleeson as Irish hitmen hiding out in the Belgian city. Like that film, Three Billboards has received strong reviews from critics. In his five-star review, the Guardian’s Xan Brooks described it as “an uproarious delight of a film that snaps the eyelids up like rollerblinds” and praised McDormand’s “powerhouse performance”.

Toronto’s People’s Choice award has become a reliable bellwether of Oscars glory in recent years, with four of its nine winners going on to win best picture at the Academy Awards, including The King’s Speech and 12 Years a Slave. Last year’s winner, meanwhile, was La La Land, which famously lost out to Moonlight for the best picture but won six other Academy Awards.

Other winners at the festival included battle-rap drama Bodied, which won the People’s Choice Midnight Madness award for genre, shock and cult cinema, and photographer Agnès Varda’s Visages, Villages, which won the People’s Choice prize for best documentary.

The Platform prize for international film, meanwhile, was won by Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country, a period western set in Australia’s Northern Territory. “It is a great saga of human fate, and its themes of race and struggle for survival are handled in such a simple, rich, unpretentious and touching way, that it became for us a deeply emotional metaphor for our common fight for dignity,” a statement from the awards jury said.