Chloé Zhao’s extraordinary film, “Nomadland,” won the Toronto Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award today. Starring Frances McDormand, “Nomadland” is on its way to the Oscars and lots of other awards. It comes from Disney’s Searchlight Pictures formerly Fox Searchlight.

The runner up is Regina King’s “One Night in Miami.” The second runner up if “Beans” directed by Tracey Deer. This means that the top 3 movies this year were directed by women! And the other two main films were, as well.

The TIFF 2020 People’s Choice Documentary Award winner is “Inconvenient Indian” dir. Michelle Latimer.

The TIFF 2020 People’s Choice Midnight Madness Award winner is “Shadow in the Cloud” dir.  Roseanne Liang.

Pop star Shawn Mendes underwrote a $10,000 prize for a Changemaker Award to “Black Bodies,” a short film by Kelly Fyffe-Marshall. Shawn gets the best advice. He’s Canadian, and this is a smart way to go. If only Justin Bieber had thought of that.

TIFF really managed to pull off this festival with great acclaim. They took a sad song and made it better! Their digital viewing room was excellent. They also introduced the likely Oscar winner.

“TIFF 2020 was a year we won’t soon forget,” said Cameron Bailey, TIFF Artistic Director and Co-Head. “Over the last 10 days, we have experienced community in the truest sense. The pandemic hit TIFF hard and we responded by going back to our original inspiration — to bring the very best in film to the broadest possible audience and transform the way people see the world through film. We heeded the urgent calls for greater representation of under-represented voices. And we watched as audiences embraced cinema’s ability to transport them through screens of all sizes by joining us online from all over this country — something that we would never have seen in previous years. TIFF delivered on its promise to provide Festival-goers and the industry with impactful programming. We are very proud of what the TIFF team accomplished.”

“The films and talent featured in this year’s Festival have left us inspired and moved,” said Joana Vicente, TIFF Executive Director and Co-Head. ”In a time where the very future of our beloved art form was in question due to cinema and production shutdowns and film festival cancellations, we have seen a tenacity of spirit. We’re heartened by the support and generosity from TIFF’s loyal sponsors, donors, members, and public audiences who encouraged us to deliver a reimagined Festival. We’re grateful for the industry delegates and press corps who championed TIFF’s decision to go ahead with the Festival. We are excited by the fact that 46% of the films screened this year were either directed, co-directed or created by women. We are inspired by the generosity of the industry, who gave their time to be present — virtually — in support of the Festival. And, finally, we are genuinely moved by the commitment of all TIFF’s stakeholders who helped us deliver the TIFF Tribute Awards to Canadian and international audiences.”

Woody Allen‘s “Rifkin’s Festival” opens the San Sebastian Film Festival in Spain on Friday night. Woody won’t be there because of the pandemic travel restrictions. The stunning Gina Gershon (her best work, brava) will be on hand but Wallace Shawn, Richard Kind, Douglas McGrath, Tammy Blanchard and Steve Guttenberg can’t make the trip. It’s too bad because they would have been lavished with applause and a standing ovation. I hope Gina really enjoys herself. She deserves it.

It seems impossible but Woody Allen will be 85 in December and he can still do it, he can still make a trenchant, absurd, fantastically funny comedy that is on its face improbable but altogether winning. Almost from the very beginning of this story about an unhappy couple who travel to the very same San Sebastian Film Festival you are laughing from down deep. And of course, all the big Woody themes are in place: why are we here? what’s the meaning of life? And what about death?

The age difference between 76 year old Wallace Shawn‘s Mort and 58 year old Gina Gershon‘s Sue shouldn’t rouse much ire among Woody’s critics. Neither should the involvement of Spanish beauty Elena Anaya, who is 45. There’s no “robbing the cradle” here. All the characters are adults and they know what they’re doing, or at least it seems like it until they become lost in Woody’s inevitable cat’s cradle of relationships gone awry.

Gershon is a movie publicist who’s married to a neurotic film teacher and failed novelist (Shawn). Her client at the film festival is a hot young French director played by Louis Garrell, who of course is handsome and shallow. Mort loathes him. Shawn stands in for Woody: a hypochondriac questioning life and death who seeks out a local doctor who  happens to be beautiful and married to a mad man Picasso-like painter. As Sue becomes more involved with the director, Mort is set loose in San Sebastian to find and make trouble.

The film is punctuated by Mort’s black and white dreams, partially based on his teaching classic foreign films but a throwback to Woody’s parodying of Ingmar Bergman and Jean Luc Godard, among others, in his own early films. Is Woody repeating himself? Hardly. I think he’s starting to close the circle from the beginning to the end of his long, illustrious career. This won’t he his last film, god willing, but he’s at a point where he’s revisiting some old themes and poking fun at himself as much as the fabled directors who influenced him.

(I’ll stop here just to tell you that two time Oscar winner Christoph Waltz makes a long cameo toward the end which, for Woody Allen fans, as well as those of Max von Sydow and “The Seventh Seal,” is a spectacularly funny surprise.)

The setting of the festival is perfect for Woody, who can then move his eccentric and self involved characters through all the machinations one finds in such a place. The background stuff is not to be missed– the junkets, the publicists, the promotion of the films. For anyone who’s ever been to a film festival, these touches are the rainbow sprinkles on a delicious dessert. Listen for the quips, they fly by before you can finish your guffaw.

And then of course supporting characters emerge to further along the main quad’s inevitable collisions. I loved seeing Steve Guttenberg, of “Cocoon” and “Police Academy” fame, rise to this occasion. And Emmy winning Tony nominee Tammy Blanchard is a wonderful surprise herself — someone please add her to the imdb page for this movie.

As usual three time Oscar winner Vittorio Storraro gives a Woody Allen film its sumptuous look, and this might be my favorite so far. He certainly made me want to visit San Sebastian ASAP.

And this Mort: Wallace Shawn is a character actor. He’s a spice, never the main course. At 76, he’s made so many films and plays and TV shows better by his presence but I don’t recall him every carrying a whole movie. He’s the anti-lead, anti-sex symbol, a kind of proud gopher burrowing his way blissfully through this mess. He never once second guesses himself despite being called a grouch and a curmudgeon. He believes in himself almost to distraction. He’s his own comic relief. And that’s why his performance works.

Will Americans ever see “Rifkin’s Festival”? This film, like “Rainy Day in New York,” should have been at the New York Film Festival. We still haven’t officially seen “A Rainy Day in New York,” although today I’ve reported it finally has a distributor. Twenty years from now, film fans will think people of this generation lost their minds. Here are two terrific comedies that rank up there with the best of this important auteur’s work, and they’ve become weirdly banned in his home country. This is an egregious mistake and should not go on any longer.