The cutthroat Oscars battle has begun: Julianne Moore, John Malkovich, The Odyssey

Every year my friends and family ask me for help with their Oscar pools.So, I thought I’d save myself some phone calls.The all-important fall film festival season is coming to a close — after the back-to-back marathon of Venice, Telluride and Toronto.All that’s left is the less-impactful New York Film Fest, which admittedly has a better-than-usual lineup this time. But the endless path to the Academy Awards in March has acquired some asphalt. “The Odyssey,” which so far has been “Oppenheimer”-ing its way to a second best picture prize for Christopher Nolan, has finally met its competition.

Su nobre es “La Bola Negra.” Netflix’s phenomenal Spanish gay World War II epic — a moving puzzle that ambitiously spans 1932 to 2017 — that bowed at Cannes in the spring just got a major boost when it was rapturously received in Toronto. That’s telling.TIFF’s shtick is that normal people attend it, rather than solely movie stars, industry and press.  My colleagues in the media absolutely hate that, and love to complain how the plebs in the audience openly laugh and cry at movies instead of sitting in stoic judgmental silence like my pretentious scold friends do.But what’s useful about TIFF is that it gives us some idea of how real human beings will react to awards contenders later on.Populist “Green Book” won the top prize there in 2018 and completely remade the race, for example.And the Canadians were all aboot “La Bola.”It probably won’t take home TIFF’s big People’s Choice Award, which will be announced on Sunday.

Foreign-language films rarely do.That significant victory could supercharge either Jordan Firstman’s sublime “Club Kid” or the Sylvester Stallone biopic “I Play Rocky” into the race if either of them are named.But, as far as a realistic shot at best picture goes, “La Bola” was the belle of the bola.Even its talented directors, Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, have a decent chance of knocking out Nola...